Usage and Effectiveness of TraceTogether App

Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Prime Minister (a) how many active users does the TraceTogether app currently have; (b) how many contacts of COVID-19 patients have been identified and contacted with the help of data retrieved from the TraceTogether app since its launch; and (c) how many of these contacts tested positive for COVID-19.

The TraceTogether (TT) Programme, comprising the TT App on smartphones and TT Tokens, utilise Bluetooth functionality to enhance and accelerate contact tracing of close contacts of COVID-19 positive patients.

The TT programme, SafeEntry and associated digital systems provide the initial list of close contacts of COVID-19 positive cases for our contact tracing teams to work on. This has enabled us to reduce the time to identify and quarantine a close contact from four days to less than two days currently.

Since we switched over to this concept of operations, 118,000 close contacts were identified, of which 4,500 subsequently tested positive during quarantine.

The effectiveness of TT and SafeEntry relies on broad based community participation. This is how we contribute collectively to keeping ourselves, our loved ones, and colleagues safe. The more people on the system, the more effective the protection. We are glad that the App has been downloaded by 2.4 million individuals since its launch. We estimate that about 1.4 million users had actively used the App in the month of August.

We will do more to encourage and facilitate active adoption, by improving the App’s features over time. We urge all who have downloaded the TT App to keep it active in the foreground. One practical way to do so is to use the App to perform more convenient SafeEntry check-ins. We have started distributing tokens to seniors and those without smart phones in order to provide protection for these vulnerable groups. In due course, we will also make tokens available for those who prefer not to use the App on their smart phones.