The Belgian government has launched a new application intended for the fight against Covid-19, even though all the indicators of the epidemic are in sharp decline.
GovApp gathers information on the fight against the pandemic and can also send messages containing codes to be tested and warnings in the event of high-risk contact, explain the ministers of public health of the different levels of power (federal and federated entities).
The application replaces the previously application SMS sending system. This process was subject to fraud and cost the government a lot of money, they said in a statement. It operates on the basis of the mobile phone number and does not store any identity data. In addition, the content of the messages is encrypted.
This is the third government application deployed in the fight against Covid-19, after Coronalert and CovidSafe.
According to data published on Tuesday by the public health institute Sciensano, all indicators of the coronavirus epidemic in Belgium are down sharply.
The daily average of contaminations was thus down 20%, to 4,785 cases, during the last week compared to the previous one. This while the number of tests fell by 5%, to 19,400 per day and their positivity rate was 27.3% (-4.9%).
The drop was even more pronounced for hospital admissions (-22%), whose daily average now stands at 138, and for the number of deaths per day (-23%), which stands at 15.1.
A total of 2,227 people infected with Covid-19 are currently in hospital (-19%), including 133 in intensive care (-19%). Finally, the reproduction rate (Rt), which measures the degree of contagiousness of the virus, is estimated at 0.85. When it is less than 1, this indicator means that the epidemic tends to decrease.
