Germany appeals to nation to download coronavirus app – The Guardian

The German government has appealed to its citizens to download a newly available coronavirus warning app as it launched what it insisted was its most sophisticated tool yet for tackling the pandemic.

The Corona Warn App suffered setbacks including disagreements over data privacy and functionality, but is seen as being introduced just in time as lockdown regulations rapidly relax with a decreasing infection rate.

The app will complement a human tracking and tracing system that has been in place across the country since February. It will alert users whether and for how long they have been in contact at a distance of 2 metres or less with someone who has tested positive for the virus.

Contact data will not as initially planned be saved centrally, only on the smart phones themselves, and the app is based on privacy-focused technology developed by Apple and Google. Users have been assured their private data will not be compromised and neither will the app drain a phones battery.

Use of the app, which cost 20m to develop, is voluntary but virologists say 60% of Germans must download it for it to become effective.

Public health leaders, computer hackers and government ministers, all of whom had been involved in its development, introduced the app to the public in Berlin on Tuesday morning. By midday it was said to have been downloaded more than 1m times. It has been backed by a massive advertising campaign across broadcasters and on billboards involving leading DAX companies and the German Football Association, the DFB, in the hope of reaching as large an audience as possible.

It follows the introduction of a French warning app, StopCovid, which launched last week but crashed four days later due to huge demand. Australia has introduced a similar system.

The German app has an open source program code, meaning it can be potentially copied and updated by other countries.

Helge Braun, the head of chancellor Angela Merkels office, and himself a doctor, said downloading the app amounted to one small step for us, but a giant step in our fight against the pandemic.

Lothar Wieler, of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germanys leading public health advisory body, said the app would be an effective tool to help us break chains of infection.

He said its introduction would mark the start of the digitalisation of all coronavirus case data, much of which has been gathered so far by about 500 containment scouts who have typically used fax machines to communicate new coronavirus cases to the RKI to ensure data protection.

Jens Spahn, the health minister, said the app would be vital in speeding up the measures taken to break chains of infection particularly at a time when Germans were becoming more mobile.

We are increasingly coming into contact with anonymous people, whether at demonstrations or on public transport, he said. Every hour we gain by an early warning is a gain in our fight against this virus. Id prefer people to get tested too often than too little.

The next step, Spahn said, would be to build a system that would work across Europe. Currently, if a German user travels abroad, the app will not work.

Timotheus Httges, of Deutsche Telekom AG, said its laboratory in Prague had been central to developing the app and adapting it to the variety of situations in which users might find themselves.

There we simulated everything from cocktail parties to the school classroom to train journeys, he said. When youre working on something thats for the benefit of the whole society, its amazing the extent of the possibilities. He said it had taken 50 days to develop, adding: It was a lot of fun.

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Germany appeals to nation to download coronavirus app - The Guardian