India Follows Singapore; Launched Aarogya Setu App To Defeat COVID-19

Right now there is a situation of lockdown in the country. The government of India trying its best to stop the infection level among the people. PM Narendra Modi already asked people to maintain social distance. Health Ministry of India has launched the app Aarogya Setu.When the virus infection reaches the community level, at the third stage, at that time the victim hardly remembers all the routine he did in the past. The victim can not clarify the exact numbers of people he met. In such a condition, the detection source becomes a tough task. So, the government has decided to follow what Singapore did.

Recently, on Friday, March 20, Singapore had launched app TraceTogether that works by exchanging short distance Bluetooth signals to detect another participating user in close proximity of 2 meters or up to 5 meters for 30 minutes. This app records the travel history of the user for 21 days. The data is stored in the encrypted format nobody can access except health ministry. 

This effort of contact tracing is being praised by the world. The faster the tracing process initiated, the faster we can reach the main source of infection to break the chain. The same kind of pattern the Indian government is going to follow. Right now Aarogya Setu is available for both Android and iOS.The government will keep monitoring increasing cases. Soon, the app will be available for both Android and iPhone platforms. The user can get statistics related to this pandemic.

The same kind of path is followed by Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC), who recently launched an app to keep monitoring home quarantined patients. The last Friday,  the app named COVID-19 Tracker was launched by SMC. Soon, Vadodara, Rajkot, Ahmedabad, and Gandhinagar are going to build their own version on the base of this app. Every home quarantined person has to upload their selfie and status twice in a day on this app. This helped SMC to find out who is breaking the rules. The Surat Municipal Corporation is the first to take this kind of initiative. This shows why they are in the top smart cities list.

The government has already launched a Whatsapp chatbot service to provide verified and true information only. To use this chatbot the user needs to save the number 9013151515 in the contact list. Just sending "Hi" to this number on Whatsapp user will reach the Chatbot to acquire the right information and precaution steps as well statistics. There is an official email address as ncov19@gov.in where anybody can send emails to receive authenticated information and related help.