Specially developed by Health & Social Care Northern Ireland to aid in fighting the world’s mortal enemy—the COVID-19 pandemic, StopCOVID NI is an essential medical service mobile application.  This app helps in tracing the positive cases in the country.  At the same time, it informs the users if they have come near to someone infected with the virus without disclosing any of the person’s personal information—identity or location. If you are over the age of 18, this will be easily accessible to you.

Secure and efficient contact tracing

StopCOVID NI is one of the government’s efforts to relieve the people on the frontlines a huge weight on their work, which is contact tracing. As mentioned, this tool will notify you if you have come in contact with another user who is Covid-19 positive. With this, you can immediately vacate the building, observe, and do self-quarantine for the next few weeks to prevent the rapid increase of the outbreak. 

Meanwhile, if you are the Covid-19 patient, you will get a code through SMS from HSCresult. When you place that code into the app, you will need to share the random IDs that your phone has been swapping with other app users over the last 14 days. It’s called diagnosis keys, which will allow you to instantly advise those who physically socialized with you that they have been exposed to COVID-19. If you are traveling abroad, the app will also securely share these diagnosis keys with other countries. This health utility never obtains any private information. However, it does collect specific data that will authorize the agency to know certain information, including the number of app users, the number of users who input the HSCresult codes, and the number of users who have been exposed.

StopCOVID NI utilizes the new technology jointly developed by the two leading companies in the industry, Google and Apple. This innovation enables the use of Bluetooth technology to aid governments and health agencies across the world to slow down the outbreak. With its design heavily centralized to user privacy and security, it provides purely automated processing with no single human involved. However,  to apply this setting, you will need to turn on ‘exposure notifications.’

Help fight the COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic situation in most of the countries aren't getting any better. StopCOVID NI is a vital app that can help various governments and agencies in fighting the spread of the virus. However, for it to work, its users must fill the necessary information with honesty. With everyone's collective efforts and technological innovation, this health crisis will be solved.