Singapore app halves contact-tracing time, leading engineer says

A contact-tracing app in Singapore that’s a key part of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has helped to reduce the time taken to isolate contacts of a patient from four days to less than two, according to an engineer heading the project.

The TraceTogether app has been downloaded on 3.8 million mobile devices in the Asian city-state of 5.7 million people, according to Jason Bay, the senior director who leads the project team at the Government Technology Agency.

While TraceTogether doesn’t generate as comprehensive a set of contacts as manual tracing, more than 10% of contacts identified turned positive during quarantine, showing the technology’s potential, Bay said at a conference.