Local Focus: Covid card experiment underway in Ngongotahā

The Covid-19 contact tracing card is now a hardware solution and being trialled in Ngongotahā.

Shayne Hunter from the Ministry of Health said the purpose of this trial was to understand how the card might work in a real world scenario, ie across the rest of New Zealand.

"Getting it in the hands of people, letting them go about their normal day or evenings, and to see whether the card would actually provide us with improvements in contact tracing," he said.

Rather than logging the wearers' every movement like a GPS, it notes other cards it comes close to. Te Arawa Covid-19 Response team member, Kirikowhai Mikaere said trust is paramount.

"The trust of our community is incredibly important to us, as is the privacy, the security and the sovereignty of the data," she said.

"Te Arawa has been very instrumental in making sure there are very tight privacy security and even data residency considerations. Any data with personal information on it, and we're collecting as little as possible, is held by Te Arawa under our governance structures, under our privacy and also resident in Aotearoa ... so it doesn't leave our shores."

Ngongotahā was chosen for the experiment because it is a small and cohesive community.

"Effectively this is Te Arawa co-designing with the Crown to have a more equitable contact tracing solution," Mikaere said. "Something that we hope in terms of the learnings, we can share with other iwi around the motu."

And because it's an experiment, Te Arawa and Ministry of Health aren't worried if locals choose not to wear the card. That's part of their research.

"We've just asked people to wear them, Hunter said. "If they forget, that's great to know. It's not a penalty, it's not a fine, it's not a bad thing. It's just that we want to know whether people put them in their bags rather than wear them or put them in their pockets rather than wear them, or forget to wear them.

"But also to understand from their day-to-day business whether in fact they do end up having close contacts with people and then we can understand what that looks like."

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