NT Check In app: Contract tracing efforts futile as Covid cases climb

The borders have flown open to travellers to the Territory, so is there any point checking in to venues anymore? HAVE YOUR SAY

WE’VE all put up with a lot of inconvenience in the past two years.

There’s been lockdowns, lockouts, lock-ins, mask mandates, vaccination mandates, border closures and more.

But as a general rule, people will tolerate inconvenience if they think it’s for the greater good. How else can you explain how millions of Australians have been willing to spend months during this pandemic as prisoners in their own homes.

But where inconvenience becomes difficult – particularly government-imposed inconvenience – is when the inconvenienced struggle to see the benefits of their sacrifice.

I have a particular problem with the inconvenience of the NT Government’s Banned Drinker Register.

Is the Territory Check In App redundant now?

It’s not because the hassle of pulling out your licence to buy a six-pack is too great an imposition, it’s that this imposition is having absolutely no impact in reducing the alcohol-fuelled harm it was designed to target.

Four years since its re-introduction there is not a single measure that points to its success. Alcohol-fuelled assaults, domestic violence and alcohol-related hospital admissions have all risen despite the BDR and a range of other government-imposed restrictions.

Yet some poor bugger behind the counter at the bottleshop is still having to scan hundreds of licences every day.

This is a story worthy of further investigation at another time. Right now, the biggest inconvenience for most of us comes courtesy of a little purple app on our mobile phones.

For months we’ve been diligently scanning those QR codes every time we walk into a building.

But surely we’re starting to wonder what’s the point?

Right now there are almost 7000 active Covid cases in the NT. There must be tens of thousands of exposure sites.

Yet as a serial checker-inerer I rarely receive notifications that I’ve visited a Covid exposure site, and when I do the information is so vague as to be rendered useless.

Last month I – like thousands of Territorians – had the misfortune of catching Covid.

I’d been checking in everywhere; Casuarina Square, TIO Stadium, Nightcliff Woolies.

But I was never contacted and asked where I’d been and I doubt any of my information was used to help inform the public health response.

This is hardly surprising.

With the Territory recording more than 1000 cases per day, it’s impossible for contact tracers to keep track of everywhere this virus has been detected.

The check-in app was no doubt an effective tool when we were recording the occasional case here and there.

But this horse has long bolted. Still, the Government insists we keep checking in.

That poor bloke in the bottleshop who used to get some respite from scanning licences when he jumped behind the front bar for a change of scenery, now finds himself spending half his time checking that everyone has checked in.

It’s little wonder the hospitality industry is at its wit’s end.

New South Wales and Victoria scrapped their check-in apps this week.

But don’t expect the NT’s app to be chucked out any time too soon.

The NT Government, which spent most of 2020 and 2021 in self-congratulatory mode over its handling of the virus, pouring scorn on anyone who suggested we’d had a touch of luck, has had a reality check in 2022.

And it’s proven itself to be a step behind the eight-ball when it comes to adapting Covid restrictions.

Territorians trying to return home at Christmas were still stuck in massive queues for PCR tests when most other states had realised this was pointless.

And until a few weeks ago, we continued to insist on rapid-antigen-tests for healthy, asymptomatic interstate arrivals, even when people in remote communities were being forced to make do with one test per house.

For weeks it’s been clear the check-in app is redundant.

NT News journalist Zizi Averill made that very point on these pages a month ago today.

Yet the mandated scanning continues.

This is one inconvenience we can do without.

Originally published as NT Check In app: Contract tracing efforts futile as Covid cases climb