Coronavirus: Contact tracing app ‘vital’ but has rarely been used

State health detectives have used the COVIDSafe app to find the contacts of a maximum of 27 ­coronavirus patients.

Authorities in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT have not used the COVIDSafe app at all. Picture: AAP

State health detectives have used the COVIDSafe app to find the contacts of a maximum of 27 ­coronavirus patients, despite 600 new cases since the mobile software was launched in April.

Authorities in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT have not used the app at all.

Victoria has contact-traced through the app in 18 cases, and NSW in fewer than 10.

Queensland and South Australia have also revealed that none of their recent COVID-19 patients had downloaded the app.

About 6.5 million Australians have downloaded the app, a key weapon in the Morrison government’s armoury to justify easing social-distancing restrictions.

“To date, there have been no COVID-19-positive individuals identified as COVIDSafe users in Queensland,’’ a Queensland Health spokesman said.

“Queensland has only experienced 17 new cases of COVID-19 since the state signed the bilateral agreement with the commonwealth on May 8, allowing access to the COVIDSafe data.

“We know most cases have been due to overseas or interstate travel or acquired from a known source such as family or flatmate.”

A South Australia Health Depart­ment spokeswoman also said local authorities had been unable­ to use the app.

“South Australia has had two positive cases since the COVIDSafe app was launched and both people did not have the app,” she said.

At the time of the launch, Scott Morrison implored Australians to download the app and said a big take-up was necessary if states were to ease restrictions and be confident they could trace and quickly isolate any COVID-19 outbreaks.

The latest COVIDSafe usage figures come days after Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said the current take-up of the app might not be enough to find the contacts of any potential COVID-19 carrier at the weekend’s Black Lives Matter rallies.

“I would be very much relieved if we had a larger increase in downloads of the app over the next week or two,” Dr Kelly said on Sunday.

A federal Health Department spokesman said on Monday that the app was still needed if a second wave of infection occurred.

“There are only a handful of cases in which health officials need to undertake domestic tracing. That is one of the benefits of the successful health management of COVID-19 in Australia,” he told The Australian.

“However, the app remains an important tool for those local cases and is being used as intended by state health authorities to supple­ment their contact-tracing processes.

“While we continue to have very few cases, we need every tool we can to continue to protect Australian­s from any potential outbreak.”

A NSW Health spokeswoman said the app had not been used to contract-trace in the past two weeks.

“As new cases in NSW have predominantly been in people in hotel quarantine in the past 13 days, we have had limited opportunity to use the app during this time,” the spokeswoman said.

“The app complements the rigor­ous system of contact tracing undertaken by expert teams of 150 people across NSW Health.”

A Victoria Health spokes­woman said that state had found any other COVID-19 cases only through the 18 coronavirus invest­igations that used the app.

“With only a small number of cases being reported each day in Victoria, there have been few opportu­nities to use the app so far — and we hope this continues,” she said. “We urge Victorians to ­download the app to augment our contact-tracing tools to stop the spread of the virus.

“This will be increasingly important as restrictions are eased.”