England and Wales NHS COVID app users told service has closed

Users of the NHS COVID-19 app in England and Wales are no longer able to use the app, due to the shutdown of the service on Thursday.

Like many other countries around the world, the UK's National Health Service has relied on apps to try and detect and cut down the spread of COVID-19 in the country. In an update on Thursday, the app stopped working for a large part of the UK.

The shutdown of the platform on Thursday only affects the app used in England and Wales. Other versions for Scotland and Northern Ireland have also closed.

Users in England and Wales are now starting to see alerts that the app is no longer functional. BBC News adds the app will be pulled from the App Store in May.

Introduced in 2020 and using the API built by Apple and Google, albeit with initial doubts on its functionality, the exposure notification app was downloaded approximately 30 million times during the pandemic. The app was a crucial part of Test and Trace, with it used to report positive tests as well as to determine if the user had come into close contact with someone carrying the virus.

Despite teething troubles, including a week in December where nearly 700,000 notifications were sent, the app may have been useful in preventing deaths.

Research from a peer-reviewed study released in February proposes that the app may have prevented one million COVID cases in England and Wales, including some 44,000 hospitalizations, and approximately 10,000 deaths in its first year of use.

5 Comments

red oak 1104 comments · 13 Years

About 1 year ago

Oh no.. What are we all going to do??

auxio 2760 comments · 19 Years

red oak said:

Oh no.. What are we all going to do??

We've studied the virus, know how it affects the body and who's at most risk of serious illness, and developed anti-virals/treatments. None of which we knew/had 3 years ago when this technology was created. But I get that studying history and understanding the rationale behind things isn't most people's strong suit.

amar99 180 comments · 14 Years

diminishing returns, end of an era which nobody will miss

sdw2001 17452 comments · 23 Years

auxio said:

red oak said:

Oh no.. What are we all going to do??

We've studied the virus, know how it affects the body and who's at most risk of serious illness, and developed anti-virals/treatments. None of which we knew/had 3 years ago when this technology was created. But I get that studying history and understanding the rationale behind things isn't most people's strong suit.

Well, yes. But by the time it was developed, "we" (e.g. those in power) knew that contact tracing was useless, that masks didn't stop the spread, and that anyone under 50 without major health problems had nearly a zero risk of dying from it. But it was still used anyway.

As for the study, it says right in the abstract that the "prevented infections" was an estimate.

The people who cry "why did you...?" when action IS taken to try and avoid disaster are the same ones who cry "why didn't you...?" when NO action is taken. Since it's not humanly possible to say with 100% certainty how many lives were or weren't saved due to any aspect of the way things were handled (whether that be lockdowns, vaccines, masks, contact tracing etc.) the only thing we can say for sure is we who are still here to write words on a forum have made it through. Let's just be thankful and move on.

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