NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant has said that the Aarogya Setu app launched by the government of India is paying an essential role against Coronavirus. He has said that the app has enabled government agencies to understand whom to test and where to test more, in efforts to combat the Coronavirus pandemic.
In a conversation with the news agency ANI, Kant said that the app helped the government find 650 hotspots and 300 merging hotspots which he said could have been missed. He also cited the role of the app in Maharashtra. He said that the app helped in finding out 60 hotspots across 18 districts in the state of Maharashtra. He revealed that on a national level its impact is high as it raised alarms of over 130 hotspots at sub-post office level in the period between April 13 to April 20. As things turned out, the union government declared these hotspots as ‘real hotspots’ after a period of 3 to 17 days when Arogya Setu had alerted.
Kant has said as many as 69 million people in the country have opted for a self-assessment test in the app which takes the adoption rate of the app to 71 per cent. Out of 69 million people who went through a self-assessment test, 3.4 million have self-declared their illness as they have one or more than one symptoms, he added. He also said that overall 6.5 million people have declared that they have more than 2 symptoms and 70 healthcare professions have reached them with their services.
Kant has said that out of all the people who have downloaded the Aarogya Setu app, at least 12,500 people have tested positive for the Coronavirus infection. On the issue of accuracy, Kant said that approximately 8,500 people were tested from high-risk individuals and more than 23 per cent of them have tested positive for the virus that implies the higher accuracy of the app.
