A contact tracking application isolated more than 600,000 Britons in a week. Self-isolation causes a wave of employers not worrying.
NHS Covid-19 – the British organization that monitors infected communications equivalent to the Portuguese Stayway Cove – issued self-isolation alerts to more than 600,000 users in the UK and Wales during the week of July 8-15. Submission of 618,903 announcements represents a 17% increase over the previous week. Even if the warned citizens are fully vaccinated (seven out of 10 are already there), all should be isolated if use flags them off.
The situation – which is “pingtemic” (due to the ‘ping’ sound associated with sending alerts) – triggers complaints from companies, isolation causes severe shortage of staff and affects the services of various sectors – food retail, gas stations, freight transport, security forces.
Due to the constraints that occur, supermarkets are already under pressure to maintain shelves with products. British chain Iceland has announced it will hire 2,000 people to cover less than a day’s hours, while Tesco has said it will not sell bottled water, saying the cooperative will have a “significant impact” on “majority” companies. According to the Daily Telegraph, British police have been hit hard by a lack of agents across the country.
Following the restrictions, the government has already announced that workers in certain industries, or those in the front line to fight the disease, will be exempted from isolation for 10 days if flagged by the application, but the measure has not yet been formalized.
Despite the high rate of vaccination, 12% of adults and almost all children in the UK are still vaccinated. Last week, more than a million children did not attend school for Govt-19-related reasons.
Portuguese usage is in decline
As reported by “Expresso” last week, since May 1, the Portuguese application Steave Covit has not received any code from those who discovered the virus. This information is provided by Porto-based INESC TEC, which manages a mobile phone application designed to initiate alerts for people using Steave Covid and those close to a victim.
According to the same message, although users do not enter the codes, they are constantly generated by health professionals when diagnosing infections. According to the shared services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS), 420 codes were generated from May 1 to Thursday last week. In other words, although this represents a small fraction of the 52 thousand active infections (today’s value), this number allows us to conclude that users who received the codes chose not to insert them into use.
