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App update available: visit registration with the Corona warning app
Photo: Christoph Dernbach / dpa
With an update to version 2.0, which has been available since Wednesday, the official corona warning app of the federal government is getting a new function that is actually already planned for "very soon after Easter", which is supposed to help in the detection of infection clusters.
Organizers, business owners and hosts can use the app to generate QR codes that are used to register visitors.
These in turn can check in by scanning the respective QR code.
If one of them later tests positive for a coronavirus infection and shares this information with the app, it flows into the risk calculation of all other registered visitors. If a threshold is exceeded, you will receive a warning. The decisive factor is whether they were in the (presumably) same room at the same time or up to 30 minutes after the infected person.
The background to the further development is the realization that the previous approach of the tracing app did not go far enough.
So far, the Corona warning app only recorded people who had been at a distance of two meters or less for a long time as risk contacts.
When analyzing infection chains, however, it turned out that this is not enough.
Because in closed rooms such as restaurants, department stores or churches, potentially dangerous air particles can also spread over great distances.
In addition, aerosols that are exhaled by infected people are still present in problematic concentrations for a while after the person has already left the room.
These findings are now taken into account in the new app version.
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This is how the QR code creation works in the Corona warning app
Photo: Matthias Kremp / DER SPIEGEL
The Corona-Warn-App pursues a different approach than that already ordered by many federal states, including the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) but heavily criticized Luca-App of the Berlin start-up neXenio.
Luca users should register by name and with their mobile phone number so that health authorities can contact them directly if it turns out that they were at the same event as an infected person.
With the Corona warning app, on the other hand, all users are warned directly via the app without the health authorities knowing who was at which event.
Version 2.0 of the Corona Warning App is available from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
If you can't find it there at the moment, you should just look again in the next few hours or the next day.
In future versions of the app, it should also be possible to display a digital vaccination certificate before the start of the summer holidays.
This would enable users to prove that they have been fully vaccinated.
In addition, the results of rapid tests should be able to appear in the app.
pbe / dpa