NHS Covid app ‘pings’ 520,000 a week telling them to self-isolate
The NHS Covid-19 app sent more than half a million alerts last week recommending that people self-isolate after coming into contact with someone who tested positive for the virus, a tenfold jump in a month to a new all-time high.
The figure underscores the rapid spread of the Delta variant and will further concern managers at factories, shops and restaurants who are already facing labour shortages, which are being blamed in part on the app’s increasingly frequent “pings”.
More than 520,000 contact-tracing alerts were sent in England in the week ending July 7, according to figures released by the NHS. That marks a 46 per cent increase on the previous week and more than 10 times as many as in the week to June 2. Wales saw a similar pace of growth.
The massive surge in app alerts has triggered fears among health bosses that a large portion of the population is deleting the NHS Covid-19 app to avoid the order to self isolate.
Ministers have considered decreasing the sensitivity of the app, for instance by increasing the contact time required to generate a ping, but this has not yet been implemented in order not to reduce its effectiveness at a time of fast-rising infections.
Government officials admit the “retuning” of the app — floated by health secretary Sajid Javid last week — is not imminent, despite warnings from employers that swaths of employees will be unable to go to work.
Business groups including the CBI, Make UK and the Federation of Small Businesses lobbied Kwasi Kwarteng, business secretary, to find ways of minimising the level of self-isolation.
Lord Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra beer and president of the CBI employers organisation, said he had raised the “very concerning” issue of staff shortages with ministers across government over the past few days.
“They need to bring forward the date for double-vaccinated people to July 19 [to avoid self isolation],” he said. “At the moment, one chef might test positive and the whole restaurant has to close.”
Charlie Mullins, founder of Pimlico Plumbers, said the government should pull the plug on the app altogether.
“People need to delete the app from their phones, it needs to be removed from the app stores and the government need to switch the system off for good next Monday when all the other Covid restrictions are removed, in favour of the much better weapons in testing and vaccination that we now have at our disposal,” he said.
However, the app’s developer urged people to keep using it.
Wolfgang Emmerich, chief executive of Zühlke UK, the Swiss IT company that worked on the NHS Covid app, said it was “doing exactly what we designed it to do”, and any increase in notifications is “a reflection of the increases in infection numbers rather than any change in the app”.
Emmerich said that at the current reproduction number or “R value” of 1.5, if all of the people pinged by the app last week did self-isolate, it could have prevented tens of thousands of infections, hundreds of hospitalisations and dozens of deaths.
“With the imminent further releasing of lockdown, R will go up for a while . . . so the impact of the app will be even higher if people keep using it,” Emmerich said.
The app has been downloaded more than 26.5m times, according to NHS figures. That is an increase of 20 per cent since the first phase of UK lockdown easing began in early March, but the NHS has refused to disclose how many people are still active users.
Estimates from Sensor Tower, which tracks how often apps are opened by smartphone users, suggest that monthly active users fell by half between October and June. (The app continues to scan in the background even if it is not manually opened.)
NHS figures show that the number of people checking into venues has fallen in recent weeks, from its peak of 14.5m scans in early June to 11.3m last week.