THE NORTH of Ireland is planning to release its own coronavirus contact-tracing app within weeks, the BBC has reported.
It follows the failure of the NHS app in England, which was trialled on the Isle of Wight.
The NI app will be based on the Google/Apple model.
It is designed to be compatible with an app due to be released soon in the Republic of Ireland. That app is also based on the toolkit provided by Apple and Google.
The Apple and Google model is more privacy-focused, but provides less data to epidemiologists than the centralised version that England was trialling.
“The Health Minister has commissioned work to develop a proximity app, based on the de-centralised Google/ Apple model, for use in Northern Ireland,” said the Department of Health in a statement.
“This work includes examining the interoperability of apps and the sharing of information across the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic,” it said.
It added that the Information Commissioner, Equality Commission and NI Human Rights Commission were all involved in exploring “statutory information governance, equality and human rights issues”, and that their assessments would be published.
If the North of Ireland manages to release a functioning contact tracing app within weeks it will be a major embarrassment to the UK government.
In England an NHS team managed to spend four months and nearly £12m developing a centralised app that did not work and had to be scrapped.
On Friday, official figures showed that the number of COVID-19-related deaths here hadfallen for the seventh week.
The NI Statistics and Research Agency’s latest bulletin shows 816 deaths by last Friday (19 June) where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate.
Seventeen of those deaths were registered last week, a drop from 21 fatalities from the previous week.
NI’s Department of Health releases daily figures that recorded 545 deaths – almost 300 fewer – by 19 June.
There have been 27 deaths in the Derry City and Strabane District Council area with 177 positive cases within the council boundary.
Tags: