The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) notes that there is a great lack of clarity among companies about how CoronaMelder works. This has led to employees in some sectors being asked to turn off the app while on the job. Therefore, the ministry is going to discuss with Apple and Google whether it is not possible to build a pause button into the corona app. So writes Minister Hugo de Jonge in a letter to the House of Representatives. In it, the minister provides an update on the latest developments in the fight against the corona virus.
The Cabinet spent months working on a corona app. The result of these efforts is CoronaMelder. The app looks at how long people are a short distance apart. Because to calculate, the app uses bluetooth. In addition, the app exchanges randomly generated codes between smartphones on which the app is installed. People who stand within 15 minutes or more of each other within a meter and a half receive a code that is stored only locally (i.e., not on a central server).
Someone who is not feeling well and tests positive for coronavirus can report it through CoronaMelder. Anyone who was too close to this person in the past few days will be notified. They can decide to give into home quarantine, or if they have symptoms get tested. The second purpose of the corona app is to simplify and speed up the GGD's source and contact investigation.
After a long testing period, CoronaMelder has been available to everyone since Oct. 10. According to Minister De Jonge, the app has been widely downloaded since then: he says it has now been installed on 3.6 million cell phones. A total of 15,658 people have reported being infected with COVID-19 through the app. That's nearly 1,400 reports per day.
Still, not everyone is happy with CoronaMelder. Employers' organization VNO-NCW and MKB Nederland feared that the app's quarantine advice would cause employees to be unfairly laid off. "The question is whether that is useful, because before you know it half the Netherlands will soon be sitting at home and there will be no more teachers, train dispatchers or truck drivers," VNO-NCW said earlier this month.
Bus company Qbuzz felt the same way. Fearing that drivers might wrongly receive notifications from the app, the transportation company asked its employees to turn off bluetooth when they were at work. And the National General Practitioners Association (LHV) recently called on general practitioners to turn off CoronaMelder at the time of their COVID-19 consultations.
Minister De Jonge is familiar with these concerns. "In practice, turning off CoronaMelder will not be necessary for most professional groups," the minister wrote in his letter to the House of Representatives. He emphasizes that the app will only notify if someone has been too close to someone infected with the virus for 15 minutes or more. According to the minister, it is important that this person be informed that he has an increased risk of infection.
De Jonge writes that it would not be prudent for the entire working nation to turn off the corona app when they are in the office, for example. "Only for occupational groups where people are in proximity to other people for longer than 15 minutes and there is actually no risk of contamination, for example because of the use of personal protective equipment or by using splash guards, turning off exposure notifications during contact or not bringing the phone with them could be an option, for example."
For these occupational groups, Minister De Jonge thinks he has a solution: a pause button. This would allow employees to temporarily halt the operation of CoronaMelder and reactivate it when they have finished working. The minister writes that his ministry is in discussions with Apple and Google to integrate a pause button into the corona app.
Finally, De Jonge reports that health care workers fear that CoronaMelder provides continuous notifications because they work with corona patients. According to the minister, these concerns are unnecessary. He writes:
"After an infected person has alerted contacts from the past period with the help of the Public Health Service through CoronaMelder, CoronaMelder does not remember that notification of infection was made. The design assumes that people are quarantined after infection. New contacts, partly because of privacy-by-design as a starting point, also do not receive notification from CoronaMelder, nor can the app be used as a 'corona passport.'"
Minister De Jonge ends his letter by saying that the House of Representatives will be informed about CoronaMelder's experiences, findings and insights in the next progress letter.
View: House letter on the status of Covid-19
