The government’s covid-19 tracing app is on the wrong track, according to Sir Ray Avery, who is co–founder of Jupl NZ
which monitors and tracks the health and wellbeing of thousands of at-risk people in New Zealand and Australia.
Not even the government, is claiming this is a personal tracking and tracing app, Avery says.
“We desperately need to use good science and scalable cloud-based tracking technology to track and trace people’s
movements and most importantly track all visitors entering New Zealand when we open our borders,” he says.
“The government app is fundamentally flawed. It requires significant manual input and compliance from users as they log
in from one venue to the next. The reality is that they are more likely to be infected from non-traceable interactions
at bus stops or a party.
“Jupl is partnering with US companies to roll out Jupl technologies in the USA but when Jupl offered to customise their
covid tracking app to meet any specific requirements the government was not interested.
“The front-end government app data is limited the back end covid traceability is primitive and comprises the newly
formed government National Close Contact Service (NCCS) which has 100 fulltime staff making up to two thousand calls a
day trying to track people possibly infected by covid-19. That’s 20 calls a day per operator and this doesn’t stack up
against the 500 million allocated for covid -19 healthcare.”
The Jupl covid app can provide personalised breadcrumb track and tracing to within a few metres and can automatically
send alerts to the user if they have been in contact with anyone infected by covid-19.
Frontline nurses, for example, can track and trace their movements and the timeframe they are exposed to infected
patients which will provide valuable insights into the epidemiology of the transmission of covid-19.
Accident and emergency medical staff can use the silent Jupl emergency assistance button to ask for help with unruly
patients.
“Jupl is a 100 percent New Zealand owned company and the Jupl cloud-based server encrypts personal data and has medical grade
privacy compliance so personal data is 100 percent secure.
“This is a fully integrated automated digital platform and operates without the need for human intervention by third
parties,” he says.