ARCHIVED - Spanish Radar Covid app detects under 2 per cent of known cases

The mobile phone app was launched a year ago but has been costly and largely ineffective

A year after the Spanish government’s “Radar Covid” mobile phone app was launched as a key element in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic, figures summing up the first 12 months of activity appear to indicate that the innovation has been a costly and largely ineffective initiative.

When the app became available Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez urged all Spaniards to download and use it, pointing out the success of such strategies in various Asian nations, but his advice seems to have gone largely unheeded. Since the launch approximately 4.4 million positive diagnoses of Covid-19 have been recorded in Spain, but only 73,624 of them can be attributed to Radar Covid, representing just 1.67 per cent.

Furthermore, with the passing of time the app is being used less and less, and in the first week of August 2021 was responsible for the detection of only 0.67 per cent of the 141,000 newly confirmed cases.

The reasons for this apparent failure cannot be identified for sure, but the most likely include a reluctance to use apps for matters of personal health, concerns over the privacy of data and a lack of enthusiasm in promoting the app on the part of Spain’s regional governments. As a result, with the total investment cost estimated at 3.5 million euros (2 million euros to the company Indra and 1.5 million euros in promoting the app), it can be said that each positive diagnosis has had an average cost of 47 euros.

When the project began it enjoyed a certain degree of immediate success as over 3 million people downloaded the app in August 2020 alone, but the figures then fell dramatically and a year later the total has risen to 7.6 million – or around 18 per cent of the population. Even if all of those people were to use it regularly this would be insufficient to make it a truly useful tool, and the reality is that many who downloaded the app early on no longer use it at all.

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