Andalusia, Cantabria, Aragon, Canary Islands, Extremadura and Castilla y León launch today the Radar COVID app in tests

The Radar COVID app is already active in the testing phase in four autonomous communities. Once the process of technical integration between the application and its health systems has been completed, Andalusia, Cantabria, Aragon, the Canary Islands, Extremadura and Castilla y León are the first regions to have fully operational the development.

Yesterday, the Interterritorial Council of the National Health System approved an agreement so that the CCAA that is ending this adaptation process can begin to operate in tests. This is a temporary agreement that allows the implementation of development to be accelerated, and which must be ratified through bilateral agreements between the health administrations of each autonomy and the Ministry of Health.

This is the first step in the national implementation plan of the application. To date, the application already has about two million downloads in its versions for Android and iOS operating systems.

At the moment, the other autonomous communities have expressed their interest in adopting the tool and are carrying out the necessary technical work to integrate the application with their health systems to be able to implement it over the coming weeks.

The development of the Radar COVID contact alert application, carried out by the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, was approved by the Council of Ministers on June 23. Six days later, a pilot was launched on the Canary Island of La Gomera to test the effectiveness of the tool in detecting contagion in close contacts in a situation of fictitious resurgence with positive figures.

How the application works

The Radar COVID app has been developed following the most guaranteed technical standards with the privacy of users in compliance with all the recommendations made by the European Commission. Thus, no user can be identified or located because there is no data registered and because the whole process takes place on your phone without leaving to any server. In addition, both the use of the app and the communication of a possible contagion will always be voluntary.

The application uses the Bluetooth connection of the terminal, through which mobiles emit and observe anonymous identifiers of other phones that change periodically. When two terminals have been close for 15 minutes or more two meters or less away, both keep the anonymous identifier issued by the other.

If any user were diagnosed positive for COVID-19 after a PCR test, he would decide whether to give his consent so that, through the health system, an anonymous notification can be sent. In this way, mobiles who had been in contact with the patient would receive a warning about the risk of possible contagion and instructions on how to proceed would be provided. By not requesting data of any kind, it is impossible to identify or locate any user in any way.

Currently, the European Commission is developing the legal and technical framework that makes possible interoperability between applications based on the decentralized model, as is the case of Radar COVID, so that they can continue to operate beyond the borders of each State. The Spanish Government has defended from the outset an interoperable model to extend the scope of this type of tools.