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Date Published: 11/05/2022

ARCHIVED - Radar Covid tracking app to stop working in Spain in November

ARCHIVED ARTICLE

Only 21% of people in Spain downloaded the coronavirus tracking app

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Radar Covid tracking app to stop working in Spain in November

Spain’s Covid-19 monitoring application Radar will cease working this November when its two-year contract with Indra is up. The government spent more than 4.2 million euros on the system in the hopes that it would contain the spread of the virus by allowing users who tested positive to log their results, but the project has proven to be a major flop.

Although the number of people downloading the app this month has exceeded the target set by the government, likely due to an upsurge in Covid cases in recent weeks, the reality is that only 21% of Spaniards have actually downloaded Radar in the last two years.

More problematic still is that fact that across the country, the autonomous communities have only requested 3 million access codes that are required to activate the app and allow citizens to log their test results. So even though the download stats are 1% higher than the government expected, the tracking system simply has not worked.

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“It is as if the bank gives you a credit card, which works correctly, but they do not give you the pin to activate it,” explained the Secretary of State for Digitization.

The data, as always, varies widely across regions: the Basque County and Galicia requested all of the codes from the Ministry while Extremadura, whose Covid incidence rate is extremely high, only requested 600. The situation is even more dire in the North African enclave of Ceuta, where not a single code was asked for during the entire pandemic.

Image: RadarCovid

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