Corona Kavach is the government’s new location-based COVID-19 tracking app: that’s how you use it
The Corona Kavach, a COVID-19 tracker, has been released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in association with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MHFW). Currently, in its beta phase, the app is still in progress and crashed over a short period of time when we were testing it, and we had a lot of trouble generating OTP to log in.
However, the goal is to use a person’s smartphone data to track their location and alert if they are at risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). According to the official description, the app aims to provide information about coronaviruses and capture information. The app is currently only available for Android.
The Corona Armor is available for download through the Google Play Store. It tracks the location of the user in an interval of one hour and tells if they have come in contact with a person tested positive for COVID-19.
The way this is going to work is simple – first, you fill out a form with six questions. It asks if you have any difficulty breathing, what is your temperature if you have returned from a foreign country, whether you are feeling body good if you have a dry cough or a sore throat, and finally In if you met a foreign country.
Based on these questions, the app divides you into different categories – from code green, all right, to orange, to see a doctor, yellow for quarantine, and red for infected. After that, whenever you go out of the house, you can press a button to activate the “armor”, track your movements for an hour. If someone else has the app and has marked themselves as infected or quarantined, and you come to the same vicinity, the app will give you an alert.
The problem is that in order to make it work, it will require extraordinary cooperation from the public. The idea is enough that people will install this app, and voluntarily inform the government about their infected status, and remember to turn it on whenever they go out in public. This is not even noticed when the method is used to identify the proximity of an infected person – location tracking via GPS may not be accurate enough to do this effectively.
Due to these challenges, it is difficult to say that the government’s Corona armor would be very effective, but if you are still interested in getting the app, this is how you will use it.
Here’s how to use Corona Kavach
- Upon opening the Corona Armor app, it shows a screen that says the app has been developed by MeitY and MHFW.
- You can read through the next few screens, and then the app asks for permission to track your location, and to access files on your device, (the reason for this permission is not explained to the user), and then, In the end, it asks you. To register with the One Time Password (OTP) sent to your mobile number.
- From the homepage, you can get some basic information about the number of infected people, the number of cured people and the number of deaths. You can also go to the menu, and fill in the questionnaire so that it knows your situation.
- Clicking on the Corona Armor logo will begin an hour-long countdown, which is how long the app will track your location.
- If you come in contact with someone who has determined their condition to be infected, the app should issue an alert, but otherwise, you need to know how to use the app.
