Malta’s contact tracing app will now work abroad as well as locally after an agreement between 16 European Union countries, Health Superintendent Charmaine Gauci said on Friday.

Gauci announced the news in her weekly Covid-19 briefing.

The contact tracing app is a mobile app which runs through bluetooth in the background of one’s phone.  If a person tests positive for Covid-19, they can submit a code into the app, which will then alert people who had come into contact with them through the same app.

After the agreement, a new version of the application now allows it to interoperate with the contact tracing applications of 16 other EU countries.

This means that alerts will now also be received if one is in contact with a Covid-19 case abroad, and can also be sent to tourists if they come into contact with a positive case in Malta.

Just over 20% of the population (98,483) have downloaded the application in Malta.  701 people have been given the code to use, while 434 have used it.

2,895 people have contacted the 111 Covid-19 helpline after receiving an alert through the application.

The countries which will use this interoperability system with their contract tracing apps besides Malta are: Austria, Belgium, Cyrus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Poland, and Spain.

The application is funded by a €150,000 grant from the European Union.

People who have the application will need to update it to get the new version: if auto-updates are enabled, then the update will be downloaded automatically; if not, the update will have to be installed many through the app store of play store.