Digitally signed tests planned until the end of June
Not only vaccinations, but also certified PCR tests will soon be able to be displayed in the Corona warning app. They should make traveling easier.
The federal government’s corona warning app should also be able to display digitally signed corona tests at the beginning of the summer holidays. It was reported on Monday from government circles in Berlin. The corresponding update is expected to be delivered from June 21, 2021. Such certified PCR tests could, for example, be presented when entering another European country and also checked like vaccination certificates. The app should soon also be able to import vaccination certificates from several people. So far, such a “family function” has only been integrated into the Covpass app.
For the creation of the test certificates, the necessary infrastructure must first be available in the laboratories. It is unclear when the medical practices can digitally certify the recovery status of Covid-19 patients. That is also planned.
Most recently, the developers at Deutsche Telekom and SAP connected the providers of quick tests to the app. According to this, up to 400,000 rapid tests could be processed via the system in one day.
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Warned up to 230,000 infected people
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has meanwhile published new figures on the effectiveness of the app, which was launched a year ago. Accordingly, based on user surveys, the RKI assumes that between 2.4 and 4.8 million “red warnings” were sent to users through the app. With 475,000 shared positive tests, this estimate is based on the assumption that each infected person has warned five to ten contacts. These therefore led to 1.9 to 3.8 million tests. According to estimates by the RKI, between 110,000 and 230,000 of these tests were positive, which corresponds to a rate of three to six percent.
“It turns out that CWA users are often surprised by the red warning and adapt their behavior as a result of the message and take measures to avoid passing on a possible infection,” says a five-page RKI paper available at golem.de. Another result of the survey: “The probability of a positive test result is significantly higher for CWA users with a red warning compared to the general population and roughly corresponds to the positive rate that can be observed with analog contact follow-up.”
Since the app was launched, it has been downloaded more than 28 million times on Android or iOS devices. The number of active users cannot be determined due to the decentralized system. However, this is likely to be a few million lower, which can be seen, for example, from the number of test results shared. In the past seven days, with an average of 1,926 new infections, only 265 were divided on average, which corresponds to a share of 13.7 percent.
Assuming that 60 percent of users share their test results, the proportion of app users among the newly infected would be 23 percent. Converted to the total population, this corresponds to around 19 million people.
The author of the article is Friedhelm Greis.
