Contact tracing: NZ 'missed opportunity' during 102 days without Covid
Wednesday, 12 August 2020
New Zealand missed an opportunity by failing to perfect contact tracing during its 102 days without community transmission of Covid-19, the head of the company that developed the Rippl tracing app says.
Paperkite chief executive Antony Dixon said the country had definitely let its guard down.
“The vast majority of people treated the level 1 status as ‘fully back to normal’ and they haven’t taken contact tracing seriously,” he said.
“The public and businesses need clear guidance from government; either contact tracing is mandatory to get into a business, or it is not,” he said.
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Paperkite developed Rippl as a more functional alternative to a QR code system subsequently released by the Ministry of Health.
The Health Ministry’s system – which has been widely downloaded but is now little used – was launched to ensure the ministry has people’s up-to-date contact details and as a basic ‘aide memoire’ to help people keep a record of the places they have been.
Like Rippl it can now automatically alert people if it later transpires they were at a venue at the same time as someone subsequently diagnosed with Covid-19, if users enable that feature.
British consulting giant Capita is currently trialling Rippl with a view to making it available in the UK and Dixon said an organisation in Hawaii had also expressed interest in reselling Rippl there.
But Dixon said it was frustrating that fewer New Zealanders had been bothering to scan either its own or the Health Ministry’s QR codes and that businesses had been taking down QR posters.
In the wake of the return of the community transmission of Covid-19 in Auckland, Paperkite had decided to provide Rippl for free for a further three months to all businesses that originally signed up to use it and to new users, he said.
Another Wellington company, SaferMe, said hundreds of businesses including Fortune 500 company Schneider Electric and Washington state’s Walla Walla University were now using an app it developed to help identify and isolate staff who may have come into contact with the virus.
Its app uses the Bluetooth and GPS features of employees’ smartphones to automatically record close contacts between staff and lets them manually enter details of other people such as clients they come into with.
The app prompts staff to report on their health each day and if any report Covid symptoms the app will generate alerts showing the work colleagues they have directly or indirectly come into contact with, through to their third-hand connections.
Chief executive Clint Van Marrewijk said the company had roughly doubled its staff numbers to 25 this year as a result of the pandemic
SaferMe received a $396,000 grant from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Covid Innovation Fund that has allowed it to offer its app to New Zealand business free of charge.
SaferMe got a lot of take-up from New Zealand businesses in April and May but the vast majority of its new clients were now in the US, Van Marrewijk said.
Commenting just before the re-emergence of Covid-19 was confirmed in Auckland, Van Marrewijk said “New Zealand businesses could be doing more – that would be our position.
“Being prepared isn’t trying to roll out a solution when cases are here, it is getting the right solution in place now.”
That was because businesses needed to have at least 14 days of data that they were ready to act on if a new Covid case emerged.
Van Marrewijk declined to comment on Wednesday on whether New Zealand had wasted an opportunity.
”Our position is contact tracing works, the Government has several public contact tracing options available and businesses wanting contact tracing can go to SaferMe,” he said.
Contact tracing within businesses had a different purpose and needed different technology from public tracing apps, he said.
“A business needs access to the information to make decisions on which division they might need to shut down or ring-fence.
“It is really important that when a business sees symptoms the right people can get isolated so they don’t need to shut down a whole division or plant.”
The Ministry of Health has announced a trial of a Bluetooth card in Rotorua that could perform the same function as Rippl without requiring people get out their phone each time they enter a venue to scan a QR code.
About 300 people will take part in the trial which has been budgeted to cost $1 million.
The Bluetooth cards will be registered to an individual and are designed to automatically record just the ID number of any other Bluetooth card that comes within five metres and the time of the contact, simply by being carried.
If someone was diagnosed with Covid, that data would allow anyone who had been in close proximity and who was also carrying a card to be automatically traced.
That system means the cards do not need to store the locations that people have been.
But Dixon said it was a drawback that the cards would need to be worn as a lanyard to work, given they had small batteries and carrying the card in a pocket, wallet or purse could hinder transmission.
Dixon believed that the Government would need to make it mandatory to carry the cards for them to be useful.
“You need north of 70 per cent uptake for them to be worthwhile.”
It has been estimated that it would cost about $100m to roll out the cards to all New Zealanders but Dixon questioned whether mandating their use was realistic.
“We don’t even have a concept of a national ID card, so I think it would be quite a bold move culturally,” he said.