A waiter wearing a face mask serves customers at a reopened restaurant in Berlin, Germany, on May 16, 2020. (Photo by Binh Truong/Xinhua)

Germany's smartphone app to help trace coronavirus infections has been downloaded 6.5 million times in the first 24 hours since its launch, the chief executive of software company SAP said.

Christian Klein said the strong public reception was testimony to the collaboration between teams from SAP and Deutsche Telekom that readied the Corona-Warn-App in just six weeks.

"It's a big success, it scales, it's user friendly and it helps society," Klein told journalists in a video briefing.

Germany joins European countries like Italy, Poland and Latvia in launching apps that use Bluetooth wireless to measure contacts between people and issue warnings should one of them later test positive for COVID-19.

Although the technology is untested, governments have rushed to deploy it in the absence of a cure for COVID-19, seeking instead to achieve a kind of digital "herd immunity" against the flu-like disease.

Widespread take-up is needed, however, to increase the chance that both people in a risk event - spending 15 minutes within 2 meters of each other - use the app. In field tests, the app successfully recorded 80 percent of such encounters.

Most apps being rolled out in Europe are based on technology from Apple and Alphabet's Google that logs contacts securely on a device and encrypts Bluetooth exchanges.

It seems as though such privacy by design has won public trust in Germany, a country of 84 million people. 

Spain will trial a new smartphone app aimed at helping to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus on one of the Canary Islands,  authorities said on Wednesday.

Reuters