MANILA - Sen. Pia Cayetano on Wednesday questioned the effectivity of the StaySafe app in the government's contact tracing efforts, saying the program only serves as a "digital log."

In the first quarter of 2021, the national government ordered all establishments to adopt the said mobile phone application to help officials consolidate data on who interacted with COVID-19 patients.

"It is just in our imagination that it is interconnected with the national government tracking system because it is not," Cayetano said during a Senate investigation into the expenditures of the Department of Health (DOH).

"Who is tracking that? Who is going to alert that establishment if somebody is positive? There is really no one or no system doing that," she said.

• IATF requires all establishments to adopt Stay Safe contact-tracing app

Local government units are on their own in determining who were possibly exposed to the highly-transmissible virus, Cayetano said.

"This contact tracing app you are relying on has limitations in what it can do. It is not doing anything for you," she told Health officials present in the hearing.

"I just need to know that it is a system that works because that system is not in place," she said.

Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Francisco Duque III admitted that the said contact-tracing platform has a "very limilited, almost no impact" to the agency's efforts to locate those exposed to COVID-19 patients.

"Ang alam ko po dito nung in-adopt na ng national government, naka-connect sa COVID Kaya, 'yung data repository system ng DOH," Duque told senators.

"The DICT (Department of Information and Communications Technology) should really make the effort to explain... We will echo the concerns to the DICT during the next IATF," he said.

The Stay Safe app is free for download and does not require mobile prepaid load to function, COVID-19 testing czar Vince Dizon earlier said.

With the app, users can just take a photo of the QR codes in malls, banks, restaurants, trains and buses, instead of manually filling up contact-tracing sheets, he said.

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