Switzerland launches SwissCovid tracing app for residents

SwissCovid, the Swiss coronavirus contact tracing app, can now be downloaded on the smartphones of over eight million residents, after parliament passed a legal amendment to govern its use and data protection. From June 25, the app will be available from the Apple App and Google Play stores for the public to test it.

This concludes an experimental test phase which, since May 25, has involved 15,000 users in the federal administration, the army, hospitals and the federal technology institutes. They were recruited to test the app’s functionality and safety.

One of the biggest remaining challenges is to convince large numbers of the public to use the app to ensure it works properly, say federal public health officials and researchers at the Zurich and Lausanne federal institutes of technology. They developed the app in collaboration with a team of scientists and experts around Europe, and the federal government’s computing science and telecommunications department and the Swiss company Ubique.

"We want to reassure citizens that this app ensures maximum protection of data and privacy, thanks to the decentralisation of the information and the Bluetooth technology, which blocks geolocation,” Sang-il Kim, head of the digital transformation division at the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), told swissinfo.ch. Kim stressed the voluntary and non-discriminatory nature of this approach to coronavirus tracing, as required by Swiss law. He pointed out that the app can only be used in containing the epidemic and confers no particular advantage or disadvantage on anyone who decides to use it.