Use of contact tracing app drops off as Kiwis become complacent

Daily use of the Government’s Covid19 contact tracing app has fallen off a cliff with less than 0.2 per cent of the population scanning posters.

Scientists say Kiwis have become complacent without community transmission, warning that if there’s an outbreak the Covid Tracer app would hardly be of any use.

Health Ministry figures show daily poster scans in the past 10 days have dropped to about 10,000 on average — down from their peak of 500,000 during level 2.

And the number of people registered with the app is 11.7 per cent with 590,000 downloads. The seven-day average for poster scans is 9616 — just 0.2 per cent of the population with the generous assumption that equates to one QR code scan per person per day.

The figures emerged as two new cases of Covid-19 were recorded. Both are women from the same family — one in her 20s and the other in her 30s. They arrived back in New Zealand from Afghanistan on July 2 and tested positive on day three of their stay in a managed isolation facility.

Public health expert Nick Wilson said the contact tracing usage numbers were “tiny” and if there were a community outbreak “it would hardly help at all”.

“This system is obviously not working — and for a very good reason in that New Zealanders are relaxed about the country’s success in having eliminated community transmission of the pandemic virus. So the Ministry of Health should probably wind up this scheme at this point.”

Wilson, a University of Otago public health professor, said the Government should be using this time to explore more effective options.

Digital contact tracing expert Dr Andrew Chen said it appeared the

Government was holding back putting more money into the app while it waited for a better digital solution.

The data on usage of the app had to be pulled from each of the Covid19 press releases and crunched by the

Herald because the Health Ministry couldn’t provide daily active user information.

Chen said this in itself was concerning because the Government should know how many were actually using the app and signing into businesses, not just downloading it.

“My understanding is that the Government has put zero additional funding into digital contract tracings at the current time.”

Among the Cabinet papers included in the “document dump” last month was advice on a digital contact tracing solution, but anything of interest was redacted, said Chen.

On Monday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the number of people scanning posters hadn’t kept pace with the number of businesses creating QR codes. “We do still need people to keep a record of where they are going because . . . if we do have a case that emerges in our community we need you to retrospectively be able to tell us where you’ve been — that is still critically important to us.”