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01st Jul 2023

The Covid tracker app has officially been ‘retired’ by the HSE

Simon Kelly

Covid tracker app

The app was used by millions of Irish people since its launch.

The Covid tracker app and the EU digital covid certificate, two very large parts of our lives at one point, have both been retired by the HSE this week.

The app helped the public with contract tracing and also allowed them to display the Covid-19 cert, a key document allowing travel and entry into pubs and restaurants.

Less than 48 hours after its launch in July 2020, the app had a million downloads and amassed a total of 4.2 million registrations in its entire lifetime. At its peak, around January 2022, it was being used by over 2 million people.

The app also issued 102,439 one-time codes to people who tested positive for covid-19 and 24,857 close contacts anonymously uploaded their contacts.

Fran Thompson, HSE Chief Information Officer said on Friday: ‘”The HSE would like to thank the public for their overwhelming support of the app, for taking up vaccines in record numbers, and for the many other important, personal and difficult steps they took to support our Covid response and protect the population over the last three years.

We hope to be able to deliver similar, effective digital health tools to support our health service in the future.”

The digital Covid Certificate was introduced in the EU in 2021 and since then over 10 million vaccine certs, 1.1m negative test certs and 650,000 recovery certs have been provided to people in Ireland.

The EU regulation that requires member states to issue digital certificates has expired and certs for negative tests or as evidence of recovery will no longer be issued from today, July 1.

The HSE said it will continue to issue people with proof of Covid vaccination via email or by post on request from HSELive, after their vaccine.

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