SCOTLAND’S national clinical director has moved to reassure the public that a new Protect Scotland app to help trace any potential spread of Covid-19 is not a threat to people’s privacy.
Last week, Nicola Sturgeon announced the Scottish Government’s contact tracing app will be available to download by the end of the month, when she addressed MSPs while setting out her Programme for Government.
National Clinical Director, Professor Jason Leitch, has indicated the software will be announced over the next few days. The app will allow health officials to trace a wider range of contacts linked to positive Covid-19 cases by using mobile phones to detect who has been a close contact.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon: 'Protect Scotland' contact tracing app to be released later this month
Speaking on Good Morning Scotland. Professor Leitch moved to reassure any concerns over the app posing as a threat to privacy.
He said: “We’ve got to just dot some Is and cross some Ts but we’re hopeful that, in the next few days, we’ll be able to announce that it’s happening, what exactly it is and how people will be able to get it.
“It will be very private, it won’t track you, it won’t hold the data of where you’ve been or who you’ve been with.
“But what it will do is it will add an extra tool, an extra piece of the armour, to fix that Test and Protect system, to allow us to get the positive cases who are in touch and don’t know each other.
“So perhaps on transportation or hospitality, where you’re not sure who’s next to you or who’s beside you.”
He said the recent increase in cases was mainly among younger people but stressed that the virus still poses a risk.
Professor Leitch said: “That’s probably the only good news of this little curve that you see.
“So far, this is relatively young people, relatively healthy people, and we haven’t seen a corresponding increase – like we saw in March and April – of hospitalisations and intensive care admissions.”
He added: “We know the virus isn’t becoming less potent, unfortunately.
“I hope one day that will be true, but the geneticists who analyse the virus almost daily looking for such a mutation unfortunately tell us that it is staying roughly the same, which is good for a vaccine, bad for the illness.”
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