NHS app could tell us so much more

IT is clear that the current growth in Covid-19 cases is driven by person to person transmission, whatever setting that may me in – home, pub, restaurant, education, work etc, etc.

We now have a contact tracing app, so why don’t we use it to tell each of us how many people we have been within two metres of each day? Just the number – not who they are!

The app collects this information but does nothing with it and it would be a minor code enhancement for the app to pop up once a day and tell you you have been within two metres of X number of people today.

For over 20 years I have been a business change consultant and the key to getting people to change their behaviour is to give them their data – not the numbers for the country or region, but their own individual contact numbers!

On the BBC Today programme this week they had someone say that before Covid-19 we each had contact with 19 people each day, on average, and that he believed that after lockdown that number had halved.

I suggest that some people – students, teenagers and others, this number could be over 100/day, but closing pubs/bars at 10pm will not bring that number down.

We need to give each person their own number of daily contacts and ask them to halve the number each day. If that doesn’t bring the number of Covid-19 cases down, then

HMG should ask us all to halve the number again.

We now have the tool to do this in the Covid-19 app, why then is it not being used?

Graham Long, Honiton