Thousands may have quarantined unnecessarily due to false alarm from COVID app

Whitehall whistleblower

A Whitehall whistleblower has told The Guardian that many thousands of people may have isolated unnecessarily due to a government error revealing they were 'pinged' by the COVID app for a ‘close contact’ in the prior five days rather than two days.

As the isolation rules for double jab people were relaxed on Monday, it was speculated that users were never told the app could notify of contact with an infected person as far back as five days before the positive test.

Official guidance for the NHS COVID app defined close contact as occurring two days before the infected person had symptoms, while the official NHS test-and-trace service has always used two days as its definition.

The Whitehall source said that the error had been flagged in a submission to Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, shortly before he resigned at the end of June but it had never been publicly admitted.

App upgrade

About a month later, Sajid Javid, the new health secretary, said he would be upgrading the app in order for people without symptoms to have only have their contacts searched for two days prior to their positive test, rather than five days. He said this was being 'updated based on public health advice to look back at contacts two days prior to a positive test'.

It is believed that the Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC) online guidance on the COVID app has never had a reference to a lookback period of five days.

This revelation connotes that many thousands of people—those who had contact with symptomless people between five and three days before the positive test—were probably asked to isolate unnecessarily.

The Whitehall source said:

The standard definition of a contact in all the scientific and public stuff from Public Health England and NHS test and trace is someone who has been in contact from two days before they have symptoms and if they don’t have symptoms but test positive, you go back two days from the test.