The Minister of Health needs to front up for the failures of his chaotic Covid-19 tracer app, National’s Health spokesperson Shane Reti says.

Earlier this week in Question Time, the Minister confirmed that he lacks confidence in the app’s ability to contact trace in the event of a community outbreak, and he has no idea how many people are actually using the app.

“If we want to prevent a second wave of Covid-19 and another potential lockdown, the Government needs to get their process and tracing technology working effectively.

“621,400 New Zealanders have downloaded the app and are registered to use it, but it is only registering 12,000 scans per day. This means less than 0.25 per cent of New Zealanders are using it.

“With more than 200,000 New Zealanders on unemployment benefits as a result of lockdown, we cannot afford for our tracing systems to not be up to standard.

“The Government had offers from multiple private providers to provide the app for free, but instead they chose to build it from within the Ministry of Health despite Treasury advising the Minister last year that they had no confidence in the Ministry being able to monitor and deploy HIT projects

“When the Minister of Health can’t even have confidence in his own health measures, the Government has a serious problem on its hands.”

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