Contact Tracing to Combat the Pandemic
COVID-19: Hardly any other term has shaped the last year and a half as much as the name of the virus which has taken hold of numerous countries since the beginning of 2020.
Combating the pandemic is a top priority in Switzerland too – and it has been a success: since the outbreak of COVID-19, considerable progress has been made in containing it. The SwissCovid app is part of this strategy. It helps to break chains of infection at an early stage and the FOITT played a major role in its development.
Collaboration at High Speed – While Working from Home
In collaboration with the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Ubique, the FOITT worked at full speed to develop a Bluetooth-based contact tracing app using the joint API from Apple and Google. Our developers set up the entire backend while working solely from home, including the CovidCode service and web application, which enable doctors to generate an authorization code. The entire system is completely open source. The source code has been made available by the FOITT on Github.
It took just seven weeks to complete the SwissCovid system, making Switzerland the first country to successfully adapt the programming interface of the two companies!
Find more information here.
New Function Supplements Conventional Contact Tracing
One year after the successful introduction of the SwissCovid app, it was expanded to include a check-in function. This allows people who are attending smaller-scale events, for example, to scan a QR code and receive notifications about potential exposure to the risk of infection, irrespective of whether social distancing was observed. The new function also meets the highest data protection standards: the decentralised system does not store any personal data and uses neither Bluetooth nor GPS.