The NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app behind the ‘pingdemic’ will close on Thursday.
The service, which forced nearly two million people to self-isolate because of their close contact with a confirmed Covid case, will stop working from Thursday after months of declining use.
It had allowed people to register positive Covid tests, which would then in turn notify close contacts about possible exposure to the virus.
This triggered an alert telling them to self-isolate.
Announcing the closure last month, the Government said: “Over the past year, the success of the vaccination programme, increased access to treatments and high immunity in the population have enabled the government to target its coronavirus (COVID-19) services.
“This includes providing continued access to government-funded testing, vaccinations and treatments for people at highest risk from the virus.
“The number of people actively using the NHS COVID-19 app has steadily reduced since July 2021.
“Since access to government-funded testing ended for most people, fewer positive test results have been entered in the app and, as a result, fewer notifications have been sent to close contacts.”
Experts at the University of Oxford and the University of Warwick have previously estimated the app stopped around 44,000 hospitalisations and 9,600 deaths during its first year of operation.
However, some who are clinically vulnerable have raised concerns about the shuttering of the app.
Speaking to Sky News, Imogen Dempsey, who is clinically ill, said: “Everybody is tired and fed up and could do without having to talk about COVID anymore.
“[But] for people like me, the fact that we still need to think about being so careful and our lives are still so much on hold, absolutely we'd like things to be different – but they're not.
“COVID hasn't gone away, and stopping recording it and trying to ignore it isn't actually a public health strategy.”
While the app is being closed down, government officials have said the technology behind it could be used to counter future pandemics.
It used a smartphone’s Bluetooth signals to estimate when people came into close contact with others, quantifying close contact as spending around 15 minutes within two metres of each other.
The app was downloaded more than 31 million times since its launch, but only just over 100,000 of those downloads took place in 2023.
