Coronavirus pandemic | Aarogya Setu may soon be default app on smartphones: Report

The Aarogya Setu app, developed by the central government, helps people to assess themselves on the risk of them contracting the coronavirus infection.

Moneycontrol News

April 30, 2020 / 09:12 AM IST

Aarogya Setu, an application developed the Centre help people assess their risk of contracting the coronavirus, may soon be among the pre-installed apps on smartphone devices.

The central government had earlier asked smartphone makers to pre-install the COVID-19 tracker on phones. This was however not possible as all manufaturing was halted due to the lockdown, a source told Mint.

The move will now be possible as mobile phone manufacturing is expected to resume after lockdown is lifted in phases from May 3, another source told the paper.

The app already has close to eight crore downloads, and in a meeting with stakeholders on April 29, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology thanked the industry for pushing the number of installations, a source from the Manufacturers Association for Information Technology (MAIT) added.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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