Covid 19 coronavirus: Bluetooth a rompecabezas for thousands of Covid app computer users

Director-general of health Doctor Ashley Bloomfield demonstrating how to allow for Bluetooth on the Covid Tracer iphone app. Photo / Mark Mitchell

By Charlie Dreaver of RNZ

Thousands of people have asked the Ministry of Health for help after having trouble enabling Bluetooth on the Covid-19 tracer app.

The NZ Covid Tracer app now has 2,514,708 registered users.

Director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said for those out and about this long holiday weekend it’s more important than ever that people keep a record of where they’ve been.

“We continue to strongly encourage people to continue to scan using the NZ Covid Tracer app and turn on Bluetooth.

“The more we all scan, the safer we’ll all be. Scanning helps our contact tracers to quickly find and alert any potential close and casual contacts of people who have tested positive for Covid-19,” Bloomfield said.

However, about 20 per cent of the country’s cellphones can’t use the Bluetooth function, due to it only working on certain operating systems.

To use Bluetooth tracing android phones need to be running Android 6 or above, and have Google Play Services enabled, and have Bluetooth Low Energy capability.

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iPhones has to be running iOS 13. 5 as well as above.

About 3500 queries have been received by the Ministry of Health from those issues enabling Bluetooth tracing.

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The most common complaint is caused from users of iPhone 6 & older- making up about a third of them queries.

The Ministry of Health said it is contemplating what is needed to update the NZ Covid Tracer app.

“Recently, Apple released support to make the exposure notifications feature that enables Bluetooth enabled tracing in iOS 12. fuve which will run on iPhone 6.

“We are looking at what we have to do to update the NZ Covid Tracer app to support Bluetooth searching for on these older iPhones, and we don’t currently have a period of time for this, ” it said.

The ministry also immensely important that people with an Android 5 garden tool use the Rippl app to scan QR codes and keep a digital diary.

“This is a privately constructed app, but it is also integrated with this contact tracing systems. ”

More details on enabling Bluetooth enabled are available on the Ministry’s website here .