Mon 06 July 2020:
Germany’s official app for tracking cases of the coronavirus has been downloaded 15 million times since it was released almost three weeks ago, the government’s agency for disease control said on Monday.
The use of the app is purely voluntary. It is designed to track known coronavirus cases and use decentralized Bluetooth technology to warn people with whom they have come into contact with.
In a country of around 83 million people, there had been concerns that not enough people would download the app to make it truly effective.
There has also been some reluctance among Germans for whom the idea of state surveillance – seen in Nazi Germany and again under the communist dictatorship of East Germany – is perhaps more worrying than the virus itself.
Health Minister Jens Spahn recently referred to the app as “one of many tools to contain new outbreaks.”
Despite some isolated clusters, including one linked to a meat-packing plant in the north-western state of North Rhine Westphalia which prompted a regional lockdown, Germany has largely brought its coronavirus pandemic under control.
The daily rise in infections stood at 219 on Monday, bringing the official caseload to 196,554, according to the Robert Koch Institute.
Among those who have tested positive for the virus, some 182,200 people are estimated to have recovered, while 9,016 people have died, the government agency said.
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