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Met Police officers privately ordered to switch off NHS COVID-19 tracing app

Exclusive: Emails show senior police leadership in south London told their officers to turn off COVID app despite safety concerns. Experts warn force is “asking for a big outbreak”.

By Peter Geoghegan and Alex Waygood
Met Police officers privately ordered to switch off NHS COVID-19 tracing app
Met Police officers in south London have been told to disable the NHS COVID app while at work | Andrew Matthews/PA Archive/PA Images. All rights reserved
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Some 1,500 police officers across south London have been ordered to switch off the NHS COVID-19 app while on duty, openDemocracy can reveal.

Superintendent Dan Knowles, of the Met Police’s south area command, told police in an email sent on 6 January that “the guidance is that officers switch the app off when at work”.

This guidance, which is a U-turn on previous advice, has been branded as “asking for a big outbreak at work”, by Dr Thomas House, an expert on infectious disease modelling at the University of Manchester.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0