Gisborne-designed contact-tracing app here to help

ON TRACK: A contract tracing app being developed by a Gisborne company. Picture supplied

A Gisborne business has come up with a way to make contact tracing for other businesses simple.

It's an app you can use from your smartphone or laptop.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced last week businesses would have to keep track of other businesses and customers they came into contact with in the continued fight against Covid-19 once Alert Level 4 restrictions lifted.

In the event someone was confirmed as having Covid-19, the list of who the person had come into contact with would be easily traceable and it would be faster for people to isolate themselves, said Gisborne ThinkSafe owner Andrew Burns.

All the information went to a secure dashboard that “hopefully you would never have to use”, said Andrew.

He had been following the news and heard the Prime Minister say contact tracing was now a health and safety issue for businesses.

”We are health and safety so I thought, right, let's make this as easy as possible for our clients but also open it up to New Zealand.”

Developers for ThinkSafe worked on the app through the night last Wednesday to make sure it was ready for the launch the next day.

The contact-tracing app kept “touch points” of other businesses and customers that business people came into contact with.

All ThinkSafe clients would get it by default but Andrew said given the circumstances he would open it up to everyone during these uncertain times.

“Our team will talk to them. It's not free but it's very cost-effective. We are aiming to only cover costs.”

Andrew said the ThinkSafe app was different from the Singaporean one referred to by the PM last Thursday. The ThinkSafe App is useful for a business to contact-trace when they are operating out and about in the community.