One Month On
It’s been exactly one month since the Ministry of Health and GovTech launched TraceTogether, the first nationwide Bluetooth contact tracing app in the world, on 20 March. Since its launch, TraceTogether has achieved a 20% population adoption rate with 1.1 million users, with half of those coming in the first 24 hours alone.
We continue to hope that the people of Singapore join us in supporting our frontline healthcare workers and contact tracers, who are the pillars of our community’s response to COVID-19.
Our journey, like everyone else’s, has been filled with ups and downs. On launch day, we had 385 cases of COVID-19 on our island. Today, there are 8,014. 😭 So much has happened in one short month. We have benefited from our discussions with other teams building digital contact tracing solutions around the world, and have learnt so much along the way; where we are able to, we have shared our experiences and the thinking behind the decisions that informed our product design and architectural choices, as well.
The Apple and Google collaboration on digital contact tracing solutions, is a game-changer, as we said previously. It will significantly improve the contact tracing capability available to governments and public health authorities over what is available through public APIs on either Android or iOS platforms. We are glad that Apple and Google are engaging governments and public health authorities around the world, including us, to incorporate feedback as the specifications for their contract tracing protocol and private APIs.
We will continue to work with both companies to improve our digital contact tracing app, TraceTogether to support Singapore’s pandemic response. We will also contribute that work back to the global software community when it is complete, so that it too can help others.
- Team TraceTogether
A team of thinkers and doers working with code, pixels and people
