Ministry of Health delays CovidCard trial amid confusion
Thursday, 8 October 2020
The Ministry of Health has delayed its planned trial of the CovidCard contact tracing system in Rotorua but Trade Me founder Sam Morgan has questioned whether it is capable of running a trial at all.
The ministry had planned to conduct a trial of the Bluetooth-based devices last month but a spokeswoman said a week-long trial would now start later this month.
Prototype cards did not have adequate “privacy and security” controls, and further development work and “supply options” were being considered to resolve that, she said.
Morgan, who has part-funded the development of the CovidCard, said the private sector volunteers who developed the contact tracing system were not involved in the possible trial.
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They had lost confidence that there was any genuine intent by the ministry to deploy CovidCards, he said.
“There is no technical capability at the Ministry of Health to deliver such a project or even further trials, so we have all stepped back from it.
“We would of course expect various reasons to be given about why it is never delivered, hence our desire to get some distance from it before the project fails in the hands of those now tasked with it.”
CovidCards are designed to automatically record people’s close contacts in a secure form, so that information can be used by contact tracers if someone is diagnosed with the virus.
Dean Armstrong, chief executive of Hamilton wireless technology company Virscient, which carried out the technical work to produce the cards, confirmed the original private sector team that worked on the CovidCard had “dissolved and returned to their day jobs”.
“The technology has been further developed independently by Virscient over the past couple of months and is currently deployed into commercial settings with all features complete,” he said.
Armstrong said Virscient had designed the “Bump” contact tracing tokens for British company Tharsus that were used to avoid close contact among participants at last weekend’s London Marathon.
The BBC reported that the marathon’s 500 event co-ordinators and 100 elite athletes wore the devices – which sounded an alarm if wearers got too close to one another – ahead of the 19-lap race around London’s St James’s Park.
The devices have received a “pandemic award” from Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering which said they had been assembled by “a multidisciplinary taskforce assembled by Tharsus, including businesses from across the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Greece and New Zealand”.
The Defence Technology Agency said in a report in July that it was impressed with the quality of the effort put into the development of the CovidCard “and in particular the attention paid to security and privacy considerations”.
The Ministry of Health has not elaborated on its concerns.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has indicated it plans to separately trial CovidCards at a managed isolation facility.
A spokeswoman said it was undertaking a range of activities and consultations to prepare for that, and was working with research organisations to consider the design of the trial.
The Government confirmed late last month that Government Digital Services Minister Kris Faafoi had responsibility for the CovidCard project.
A spokesman for Faafoi said last month that “ultimately accountability will rest with Cabinet, while presentation of recommendations is likely to be a joint ministerial process”.