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There have been 7.75 million downloads for Hong Kong government’s LeaveHomeSafe contact tracing app, Secretary for Innovation and Technology of Hong Kong Alfred Sit Wing-hang wrote in a blog post Sunday.
The secretary said authorities are offering digital support amid the city’s fifth pandemic wave.
Apart from the LeaveHomeSafe app, the government’s vaccination and testing registration website has been accessed by over 10 million users. The iAM Smart app for getting vaccination records has been downloaded for over 5.4 million times.
Citizens have opened over 700,000 accounts under the Hong Kong Health Code system, an online system which records one’s Covid-19 test data and vaccination records to facilitate health declaration when traveling to Guangdong province or Macau.
“These numbers reflect how hard our colleagues have worked to fight the Covid epidemic,” Sit said.
The LeaveHomeSafe app, first launched in November 2020, requires users to hold their devices up to a QR code to record their visit. The use of the contact tracing app became mandatory in all restaurants, gyms, hotels, cinemas, and other regulated premises on December 9 last year.
Sit said in a Legislative Council panel meeting in February that the Innovation and Technology Bureau (ITB) had been developing an automatic check-in function for the app, so that users would have their whereabouts recorded without scanning a QR code.
Sit also said that the ITB’s designated materials research center NAMI, the Nano and Advanced Materials Institute, has successfully released their new nano-fiber technology capable of killing the Covid-19 virus to two local mask manufacturers.
“The manufacturers will produce masks with stronger protective capabilities which will be available to the public in due time,” said Sit.
According to NAMI’s website, the new masks will feature the research center’s proprietary nanofiber filtration membrane with bacterial and particulate filtration efficiencies (BFE and PFE) well beyond 95 percent after 30 washing cycles.
Sit added that the ITB has liaised with internet service providers to install WiFi routers in community isolation facilities, as he thanked telecommunications companies including 3 Hong Kong, Smartone, China Unicom, and Hong Kong Telecom.
Department of Health principal medical and health officer Albert Au Ka-wing announced last Sunday that LeaveHomeSafe had stopped alerting users when infections are found at the premises they visited.
The alert system was halted in order to allow those “truly in need” to receive testing.
“Premises visited by Covid-19 patients spread throughout Hong Kong now. It is no longer possible to enforce the alert system,” Au said.
