The Health Minister called on public transports and shops to step up efforts to increase usage of the Druk Trace contact tracing app. The Health Ministry’s analysis of the app’s data found that very few taxis and public buses have registered on the app so far.
As of today, only around 17,000 public transports have registered the Druk Trace App and even fewer are actually asking their passengers to scan the app’s QR code. Health Minister Dechen Wangmo said the story is no different in most of the shops.
“If you are not using it, just by printing it out and putting it on your dashboard will serve no purpose. Or putting it in front of your shop and not even monitoring it will not serve any purpose. Then it becomes doing it for the sake of doing it without a purpose. if you want the purpose, enforcement and monitoring will have to come in which means it really is the responsibility of the shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and bus drivers to really implement. We are writing to RSTA to remind taxis and other public transports to really use the app,” Lyonpo said.
The Minister said using the app and following other COVID-19 public health interventions could save the country from going into another nationwide lockdown.
“If we follow the public health measures, use the Druk Trace App we can choose smart lockdown which will require lockdown of only certain areas from where the cases are reported. We must focus on non-pharmaceutical public health interventions which include wearing a mask, hand washing, avoiding crowd and gathering, using Druk Trace App, so that we know exactly where the clusters are,” Lyonpo added.
The contact tracing mobile application maintains a log of visitors at a particular place. The data is registered with the Health Ministry in real-time and enables easy contact tracing in case of local transmission. Currently, around 260,000 people in the country are using the app.
Phub Gyem
