Track and trace: will the government's new app work?
Tracking and tracing the movements of people with symptoms of Covid-19 is key to the next phase of ending the lockdown. But as the government trials a contact-tracing app on the Isle of Wight, Alex Hern reports on concerns about privacy, effectiveness and trust
As the government begins to navigate the gradual exit from the coronavirus lockdown, it has been pointing to its contact-tracing app as one of the key pillars of its strategy. The app is being piloted on the Isle of Wight, where residents including Dr Tom Moore have been asked to download it and update it with any symptoms of Covid-19. If it is successful in alerting those who could be infected and relaying outbreak hotspots to the NHS, it could soon be rolled out nationally.
Before that though, there are a number of potential hurdles. As Alex Hern tells Anushka Asthana, parliament’s human rights committee has serious reservations on how data is handled, and there are concerns that uptake of the app will not be as high as needed and, perhaps most pressing of all, that it won’t work.
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