Spain plans to roll out its Covid-19 tracing app in September

Authorities in Spain aim to roll out a contact-tracing app across the country in September. They said on Monday that a pilot showed it could detect almost twice as many potential infections as human trackers during a simulated outbreak on La Gomera, an island next to the tourist hotspot of Tenerife in the Canary archipelago.

Spain used a new system developed by Google and Apple, which holds data on individual devices to ensure privacy, to build an app that it tested in July, Reuters reports.

Now the government aims to offer it to regional health authorities who could have it ready by mid-September, and from August 10 to tourism-dependent areas or places where cases are rising.