In response to the Lusa News Agency, the Institute of Systems and Computers Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC) said that since the launch of the app, on 1 September, more than 12 thousand codes have been generated and inserted in the app for users who tested positive for the new coronavirus.

The 12,050 codes were generated by the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS), of which users introduced 2,804 in the app.

In the four months of operation of the app, more than 508,715 new infections were accounted for by SARS-CoV-2 in Portugal, and when the launch of Stayaway Covid the country registered 58,243 positive cases.

The app has had 2,970,708 downloads of the operating systems from Google, Apple and Huawei.

The Porto Institute estimates that 40 percent of apps are active.

The mobile app allows to quickly and anonymously track, through physical proximity between Smartphone, the contagion networks by covid-19, informing users that they were, in the last 14 days, in the same space as someone infected with the new coronavirus.

On the day the app was launched, the Prime Minister, António Costa, considered that installing the Stayaway Covid app on mobile phones was a “civic duty" to stop the pandemic until there was a vaccine.