Europe rolls out contact tracing apps to battle Covid-19

ROME/BERLIN • When three people in the northern Italian region of Liguria tested positive for the coronavirus last week, they gave their doctors permission to punch into a national server anonymous codes generated by a new contact tracing application on their phones.

Moments later, the phones of people who had also voluntarily downloaded the app and had come into contact with them buzzed with an alert.

Italy expanded that pilot programme on Monday to join the first European countries - including France, Germany, Britain and Poland - using national contact tracing apps.

This comes as more European countries loosened restrictions and opened borders to one another this week, hoping to revive their societies and economies without reigniting the contagion.

Although the technology is untested, governments have rushed to deploy it in the absence of a cure for Covid-19, seeking instead to achieve a kind of digital "herd immunity".

Widespread take-up is needed, however, to increase the chance that both people in a risk event - spending 15 minutes within 2m of each other - use the app. In field tests, the app successfully recorded 80 per cent of such encounters.

Most apps being rolled out in Europe are based on technology from Apple and Alphabet's Google that logs contacts securely on a device and encrypts Bluetooth exchanges.

Such privacy by design appears to have won public trust in Germany, a country of 84 million.

Its app was downloaded 6.5 million times in the first 24 hours since its launch on Tuesday, the chief executive of software company SAP said yesterday.

"It's a big success; it scales, it's user-friendly and it helps society," said Mr Christian Klein.

France's app, which stores data centrally and is not supported by Apple, has been activated by just 2 per cent of the population.

The European Commission, in an announcement on Tuesday that coincided with Germany's launch of the app, said European Union members agreed on technical standards for interoperability between their smartphone apps. The move could help revive travel and tourism within the bloc.

The commission said it will be responsible for managing a central gateway for national apps to "talk" to one another.

"As we approach the travel season, it is important to ensure that Europeans can use the app from their own country," Mr Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for the internal market and digital economy, said in a statement.

NYTIMES, REUTERS