Labor's Chris Bowen has criticised the government's COVIDSafe app, which is yet to find any close contacts of an infected person who had not already been identified manually
, no contacts had been identified solely through the COVIDSafe app, state health department sources said.Credit:In Queensland and South Australia, no one diagnosed with the virus had downloaded the app while in Western Australia there had been no cases of community transmission to make it useful.
"It's played no role in effectively finding anybody who's been exposed to COVID19 ... this is a $2 million failure," Mr Bowen, Labor's health spokesman, told Nine News.The $2 million app – launched on April 26 and downloaded more than 6.6 million times so far – was built to assist state and territory contact-tracing teams uncover close contacts of COVID-19 cases. It collects data that can identify when users have been within 1.
The federal government said the app was working and data was being retrieved by some health departments. However, Nine News confirmed through state health department sources no contacts had been reached beyond what contact tracers had been able to do manually. On Monday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Australia needed to adopt "a whole series of processes" to trace contacts of infected people while Health Minister Greg Hunt said the app provided additional support.
NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant told reporters the app had not been "the major feature" in the state's contact-tracing efforts, while Victoria's Chief Health Officer Professor Brett Sutton said: "We haven't found a number of additional contacts."
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