NHS Covid19 app launches today

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If you have a smartphone you can now download the NHS Covid 19 app from today. The more people who use the app the more useful it will be and so everyone over 16 in England and Wales is asked to download it.As well as contact tracing, health chiefs say the goal is to change people’s behaviour to make them less likely to catch or transmit the coronavirus.

Apple and Google’s automated contact-tracing technology will be used to tell people to self-isolate if their phone detects they were near someone later determined to have the virus.
But there’s more, including:
  • a venue check-in barcode scanner
  • a postcode-based risk-level checker
  • a symptoms-reporter tool
  • the means to order a coronavirus test and receive its results
  • a countdown timer to keep track of how long to stay in self-isolation
  • a guide to the latest advice on local restrictions, financial support and other related information

There’s more information about the app and how it works here: https://www.covid19.nhs.uk/pdf/introducing-the-app.pdf

You can download it by going to Google Play on an android phone or Apple App Store on iPhones and searching for  “NHS Covid-19”.  Or there is a guide if you need some help downloading it: https://covid19.nhs.uk/help-downloading.html

Unfortunately it doesn’t work on some older smartphones.

I downloaded it this morning and it looks fairly simple to use – Valerie