Labor leader Anthony Albanese has labelled the app a 'dud'.
The CovidSafe contact tracing app was much hyped by the federal government and touted as a crucial tool that would keep Australians safe while coronavirus lockdowns were lifted.
NSW Labor MP Anoulack Chanthivong recently entered self-isolation after attending the Crossroads Hotel, which is at the centre of an emerging cluster in Sydney. Earlier in July, Victoria's Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton warned that the state was battling to stay on top of the contract-tracing effort. The federal government's Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, Karen Andrews, recently defended the CovidSafe app. I wouldn't call it a failure at all. Many, many people actually did download and are using the COVID app, and I would encourage them to keep doing that," she told reporters.
More than 6.2 million Australians have downloaded the app, with a surge in downloads in the early weeks of its release in April before downloads tapered off. "So the most important thing to say is that if you are running it you need to make sure you are running the most recent version of it, it is functioning better, not perfectly, as the old version used to."Initial versions of the app failed to work in the background and required users to have the app open to be effective.
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