App users as Gaeilge wrongly told go to the doctor
IRISH speakers have wrongly been told by the State’s Covid Tracker App to go to their doctor even though they have no symptoms of coronavirus.
The Irish-language version of the smartphone app – designed to help identify close contacts of people who have been infected – wrongly told some users they should seek medical attention and self-isolate when they did not need to.
The HSE blamed a translation error for the problem.
The Covid Check-in feature of the app allows users to answer a series of questions in order to establish if they have any symptoms.
The Irish-language version of the question: ‘Do you have any loss of sense of taste or smell?’ is misphrased and reads: ‘An bhfuil tú ábalta boladh nó blaiseadh de rudaí faoi mar a bhíodh tú i gcónaí?’ meaning: ‘Can you smell and taste things as you usually do?’
The app is set to give the same response to a Yes or No answer in both language versions. So answering ‘Yes’ in the Irish version mistakenly leads users to be wrongly told to consult their doctor and stay away from other people.
The HSE told the Tuairisc.ie Irishlanguage news website which highlighted the problem that a translation error had caused the problem and that it would be reviewing the Irish version of the app in order to make sure everything is correct.
The Irish Mail on Sunday has also had reports of users of the Englishlanguage version receiving an alert telling them that they have been in contact with a confirmed case, only for this alert to disappear.
When the user has contacted the HSE’s contact tracing service, they have been told there has been no such close contact and there is nothing amiss.
The HSE press office said these alerts did not come from the app itself but are controlled by the phone’s operating system and ‘may have been notifications that the iPhone or Android phone provide to people about how the exposure notification system is working’.
A close contact is defined as being within two metres of a confirmed case for more than 15 minutes.
Nearly 500,000 people deleted the app because a technical problem was leading their battery to go flat, bringing the number of Irish people with the app on their phones down to 1.2 million from 1.7 million.