Keeping your loved ones safe with Suwapetha
With the resurgence of the SARS CoV-2 virus in what people are calling “the third wave”, there is no greater time than now to strictly adhere to the safety protocols enforced by health officials. Google, for example, has added COVID-19 exposure notifications to its Pixel line-up of smartphones and other supported devices. These notifications will essentially give you a breakdown of the COVID-19 virus in your immediate area. Sri Lanka has also had its own version of a live COVID-19 tracker, but very few people seemed to have heard about it, until now.
Called Suwapetha, the app is developed by the Epidemiology Unit of the Western Provincial Ministry of Health and the WHO country office for Sri Lanka. The development team consists of Dr. Padmal De Silva, Dr. Yudhisteera Wedisinghe, Lt. Col L.R.K. (retd.) Kahandagamage RSP SLSC, and Mr. Tayon U. Jayawaradana. Released on the 22nd of November 2020, the app has undergone its fair share of tweaks and modifications. The most stable version of the app was launched on the 30th of April 2021.
What exactly is ‘Suwapetha’?
Think of it as a live COVID-19 tracker. You can use the app to see which areas in the country are affected by the COVID-19 virus. More importantly, it gives you real time statistics of those infected with COVID-19 in your immediate vicinity. The app also provides you with several guidelines and precautionary measures you can take to keep you and your family safe.
How does ‘Suwapetha’ work?
Once the app has been downloaded to your smartphone/tablet, you are required to create an account on the app. This can be done either via your Google account or by signing in with your Facebook credentials. Once you have signed up, the app will request access to your immediate location. Once the permission is granted, the Suwapetha app is ready to go.
The app has a number of tabs. The first tab is the real-time COVID-19 tracker. The app uses Google Maps, making use of geospatial data as its backbone to show you your precise location and rates the area you’re in based on how close you are to the nearest COVID-19 patient. It also displays the total number of patients within one square kilometer. The little bulb icon on the main screen gives you a live COVID situation, showing the number of active cases, number of recoveries and also deaths.
Suwaeptha also gives you a breakdown of daily confirmed cases. This data is further broken down into age categories and gender. Looking a bit more into where Suwapetha gets its data from, it appears that the developers data source is the COVID19API, which is a free API for data on the Coronavirus, which in turn gets its data from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.
Suwapetha also provides details of emergency contacts such as the Presidential Task Force, Government Information Center, Quarantine Unit, Health Promotion Bureau, and Lanka Sathosa, to name a few. Lastly, you can edit your profile, and add your contact details, address, age and gender if you wish to do so. If you are a doctor, you can also join Suwapetha’s Doctor Registration programme to help those in need.
What’s it like using ‘Suwapetha’?
To be perfectly honest, I was quite impressed with the app. Yes, the design could use a few tweaks here and there, but in terms of functionality, it delivered on everything it said it would. As soon as I gave the app access to my location, it alerted me that I was in a critical area and that the nearest COVID-19 patient was 250m away from where I was. The app also gave me details of the nearest hospital (along with directions to get there) and the nearest pharmacy (along with respective directions) as well.
Being touted as a “live” COVID-19 tracker, you would expect that Suwapetha gets updated frequently. And it is, to a point. Keep in mind that this app is developed by a small team and they indeed have their work cut out for them when it comes to making sure that the figures they publish are accurate. For example, it might take a couple of hours or perhaps even longer for Suwapetha to be updated with the latest figures, especially if it’s taking geospatial data into view. As some consolation, the app does provide the last time that it was updated so that’s something.
All things considered, Suwapetha is indeed a step in the right direction to keep yourself aware of what’s going on around you. It should be noted that Suwapetha is only to be used as a reference and information portal. The last thing we need is someone causing unwanted panic because there’s a COVID-19 patient near their location. So if you’re prone to anxiety attacks and are overly anxious about the current situation, we’d recommend you not install the app, or you can opt to get details from a trusted family member/friend. After all, the purpose of Suwapetha is to keep track of such occurrences and advise the general public on what preventive measures can be taken. At the time of writing, Suwapetha is only available for Android, but it may be available for iOS on a later date.