The lower Swiss house of parliament has given a preliminary green light earlier today whereby a contact tracing application is developed which is meant to help curb off the spread of the Coronavirus. The SwissCovid tracing application as it’s called is expected to be rolled out this month.
Approval had been gotten from the upper chamber of the parliament just last week or the SwissCovid which denotes a final formal vote which will get the full approval of the application by next week which will allow the Swiss government to adopt a decree that will implement the new scheme.
While the issue of privacy is still the main concern over majority of this contact tracing applications, some other European countries are trying to adopt a second generation tracing application which ca work on iPhones as this is one of the most popular device being used in the continent. The application is meant to have no dependence on a centralized database which could compromise privacy.
And speaking of the popularity of iPhones in Europe, there are about 30% running on iOS in the continent while all others run on Google’s Android and as a matter of fact both companies own the largest 99% of the world smartphone operating system by market share.
As of now, there have been 30,972 reported cases of Covid-19 in Switzerland with about 1,661 deaths showing a high mortality for the disease. The country has though been trying to ease off it’s restrictions on public life as the number of new cases reported per day has dwindled seriously.
The Swiss app is being trialled after army volunteers tested whether it could work in settings such as a cafeteria, a train journey, a shop queue or a house party. The usage of the SwissCovid tracing application is meant to aid manual contact tracing via the use of phone calls from a tracer as well as an app notification which will provide double confirmation that a person is the risk of contracting the disease.