Tracing contacts as quickly as possible to break chains of infection is one of the keys to continuously containing the coronavirus pandemic. The City of Bonn relies on IRIS and UNDO for digital contact tracing.

"The two systems enable the smooth and largely seamless transfer of contact and infection data from as many digital solutions as possible to the public health department in order to break chains of infection quickly and effectively," emphasizes Mayor Katja Dörner. "With IRIS, almost all contact tracing apps available on the market are connected to the public health department," she continued. The advantage: event organizers, catering businesses and retailers are free to choose which solution they want to use for digital contact tracing!" With the use of UNDO, the city administration itself relies on an application from a Bonn-based company.

IRIS

The IRIS gateway from the non-profit Björn Steiger Foundation, the Public Health Innovation Network and the "Wir für Digitalisierung" initiative acts as a "bridge" between contact tracing apps and the health authorities. On request, it transmits data from these apps to the health authorities in a usable format and in compliance with data protection regulations. In addition, IRIS offers citizens the opportunity to transmit their personal contacts from an app with a contact diary function directly to the public health department via IRIS.

IRIS makes the data from more than 60 contact tracing applications available to the health authorities. Businesses and traders are therefore free to choose the contact tracing solution that suits them best. The selected solution should only be compatible with IRIS in order to maximize the added value for the health authority.

Another advantage is that neither the cities nor the app providers have to develop different, individual solutions for transferring data to the specialist application used in the health authorities.

The following online form can be used to transmit data without apps or from apps that are not connected to the IRIS gateway. This can also be used to send the collected contact data directly to the public health department while ensuring data protection.

UNDO

One of these contact tracing apps is UNDO from the Bonn-based company Scopevisio AG. The city administration decided to use UNDO because the app's individual functions offer particular added value.

If a person who has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 reports that they have used the UNDO app, they can use UNDO to send their personal visit history directly to the municipal health department in compliance with data protection regulations. With this personal data, the public health department can request facilities to release visit data of potential contact persons if there is a legitimate interest. For this purpose, the operators transmit the data to the public health department via one of the numerous apps, whose data is in turn bundled by IRIS.

The city administration uses UNDO to register contacts in its office buildings. As a first step, it is using the application for some of its own events and for meetings of the council and its committees. To this end, the meeting rooms in City Hall have been added to the system, with rooms in Beuel Town Hall and Hardtberg Town Hall to follow. The necessary digital registration of contacts is to be gradually expanded.

Here, too, the handling is very simple: QR codes will be placed in the relevant rooms. These can be scanned by people using the UNDO application. If a person is reported as infected, the public health department can call up/detect all close contacts in an infection cell dynamically calculated by UNDO around the infected person as well as their visit history.