OVER 1 MILLION PEOPLE HAVE DOWNLOADED THE ‘STAYAWAY COVID’ APPLICATION

The screening application ‘StayAway Covid’ has already been downloaded by more than a million people, nineteen days after its launch, announced today the administrator of the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC).

Speaking to the agency Lusa, Rui Oliveira said that the application had a total of 1,030,824 downloads on iOS and Android operating systems today.

“We are very satisfied, even though I am not exactly surprised. The application is an aid to the Portuguese population, but the remaining five million Portuguese [who have ‘smartphones’] are still missing ”, he said.

The mobile application, launched on September 1st, allows to track, quickly and anonymously and through the physical proximity between ‘smartphones’, the contagion networks by covid-19, informing users that they have been, in the last 14 days, in the same space as someone infected with the new coronavirus. Its installation is voluntary.

According to the administrator of the Porto Institute, interactions in the application continue, with “several dozen” doctors already generating codes.

To Lusa, on September 8, the President of Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS) said that the SNS 24 line had already received 20 calls from people who, through the application, were informed that they had been in contact with someone infected.

“There were 20 people who, since the beginning of the project, called SNS 24, saying that the application notified them that they had had a risky contact,” said Luís Goes Pinheiro, adding that, this week, nine patients had introduced the application code that allows you to alert the people you have been with in the previous 14 days.

On the day of the launch of the application, the Prime Minister, António Costa considered that installing the application ‘Stayaway Covid’ on mobile phones is a “civic duty” to stop the pandemic until there is a vaccine.

“Understand that it is a civic duty to download this application and signal if they come to be diagnosed as testing positive,” said António Costa, at the ceremony attended by the Minister of Health, Marta Temido.

However, consumer protection organization Deco Proteste placed reservations on installing this application on mobile phones, invoking the possibility of undeclared and misuse of personal data by Google and Apple.

From Jornal Madeira