CoronaMelder sends reports of contamination an estimated 10,000 times a day

The Coronamelder has 3.7 million downloads and the Department of Health estimates that the app sends notifications 10,000 times a day. The app would sometimes also send the report to people who were at a relatively great distance from an infected person.

About 1,400 to 1,500 people who have tested positive use the Coronamelder app every day and are estimated by the Ministry of Health to have had an average of 5 to 15 contacts. On the basis of that estimate, it would be a minimum of 7,000 and a maximum of 22,500 reports per day, but Ron Roozendaal, chief information officer of the Ministry of Health, compared the NOS to about 10,000 daily reports.

Departmental research shows that about 70 percent of users who receive a report have been within five feet of an infected person; twenty percent will receive this notification if they have been 1.5 to three meters away from an infected person.

A few dozen of the 10,000 people who would receive a report every day could have been at a safe distance of between three and ten meters, Roozendaal admits. A practical test on a Defense site showed that there was a small chance that the app could also send notifications at distances greater than 1.5 meters. “This concerned people who were with someone with corona for a longer period of time,” said the app’s project leader.