Aarogya Setu identified over 3,000 Covid-19 hotspots in 3-17 days ahead of time: Kant

NITI Aayog CEO, Amitabh Kant on Tuesday said that the Aarogya Setu application has reached to "50 million subscribers in 15 days and 100 million subscribers in 40 days."

Of the more than 114 million registered users, two-thirds have taken the self-assessment test to evaluate their risk of exposure to COVID-19. The App has helped identify about 500,000 Bluetooth contacts.

In addition to that, the NITI Aayog CEO also said that the app has been able to identify "more than 3,000 hotspots in 3-17 days ahead of time."

Earlier today, the government said that it will be open sourcing the code of Aarogya Setu App for the Android smartphones. The code will be available after midnight of 26 May on open source code repository Github. Almost 98% of Aarogya Setu Users are on Android platform, the government said in a statement.

“This is a unique thing to be done. No other govt product anywhere in the world has been open sourced at this scale. Today its scale and size is 115 million. It cuts across phones, IVRS. Only product available in 12 languages. All covid-19 related apps put together, Aarogya setu is bigger than all of them," Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog told Mint.

Open sourcing an app’s code means the government will publish it on a public code repository, like Github for everyone's access. It said that the same updates will also be available for iOS and KaiOS (on JioPhone) versions of the app soon, the government said in a statement.

The Aarogya Setu application helps users identify whether they are at risk of COVID-19 infection. It also provides people with important information, including ways to avoid coronavirus infection.