CEO of the NHS’s central digital unit, NHSX, has said that the government’s COVID-19 digital contact tracing app will technically be ready for wide scale use in two to three weeks. However, Matthew Gould added caution by saying that the timing of the app release will depend on the readiness of the government’s broader test, trace and isolate strategy.

Gould was answering questions from members of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, where it was also revealed that NHSX believes it is ahead of Google and Apple on the development of contact tracing solutions and waiting for them to catch up could delay rollout.

Contact tracing apps - which use bluetooth technology via your smartphone to keep track of who you come into close contact with - have been touted as one of the ways to better manage the spread of the novel Coronavirus and help ease lockdown restrictions.

The idea being that if you start to experience symptoms in line with COVID-19, you then self report these into an app and that then lets everyone you came into contact with know to self-isolate too. Testing on everyone involved would then be carried out to confirm whether they COVID-19 or not.

The development of these contact tracing apps have been aided by Google and Apple coming together to develop an API - and a future platform built into their respective OS’s.

The government is hoping to couple this with 100,000 COVID-19 tests a day and the hiring of 18,000 staff to support manual contact tracing. It is unclear when both these targets will be met.

Gould explained the working and said"The way that we can manage this safely is by being able to rapidly detect and isolate people who have recently come into contact with new COVID-19 cases. So, the message needs to be, if you want to keep your family and yourselves safe, if you want to protect the NHS and stop it being overwhelmed, and at the same time get the economy moving, the app is going to be an essential part of the strategy for doing that."