Trade Me founder Sam Morgan and Animation Research boss Ian Taylor have made impassioned pleas for the Government to bite the bullet and issue a Bluetooth Covid tracing card to all New Zealanders.

Morgan said the discovery of Covid in a South Auckland family on Tuesday meant it was almost certainly too late to prevent a second outbreak of the virus progressing to another nationwide lockdown.

“There is no chance that manual contact tracing can get in front of a virus where you have 50 per cent of people being non-symptomatic spreaders.

“The person they have found was exposed probably two weeks ago because they have been sick for seven days and that person has been shedding the virus in the community for well over a week and everyone they have infected has also been shedding the virus.”

But Morgan said that if the Government made a decision now on issuing CovidCards to New Zealanders at a cost of about $100 million, it could make future outbreaks possible to manage.

“After this lockdown it would be good to have a CovidCard as it may enable us to prevent ‘lockdown 3’, which is really what we have been positioning for.

“If a CovidCard had been deployed in advance of this situation you would be able to traverse the infection tree upwards to find out where they got it from, and downwards to see who they had given it to.”

Morgan has been driving and partly-funding the non-profit initiative to make New Zealand the first country to issue Covid tracing devices to all its population.

The battery-powered cards would be registered to an individual and would record when another card came within five metres.

The cards would not need to record where people went, but if someone contracted Covid the data from the cards would be used to work out who they had been in contact with and when.

The Health Ministry has agreed to a $1 million trial of the devices in Rotorua, but Morgan said the trial would not the country get any closer to a deployment.

“It is going to answer questions they have, ‘such as how do people feel about wearing one of these things’ and how politically-acceptable it is.”

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But people were much more willing to carry a CovidCard than they were yesterday, he said.

“Once their relatives start dropping dead they will be even more willing to wear it, so you are testing a very dynamic situation.”

A CovidCard could have been deployed by September or October but “dilly-dallying” meant it might be constantly six months away from deployment, he said.

The technology response to Covid was essentially being led by the same people who had been responsible for tech support to the ministry prior to the pandemic, he said.

“Deciding to do it is what brings us closer to deployment.

“Someone needs to stand up and say ‘this problem is big enough and the technology is proven enough for us to do it’.”

An advantage of CovidCards over tracing apps was that there their use could be universal, Morgan said.

“The main problem you are trying to address with a ‘simple hardware’ approach is one of equity.

“As expected the virus has been found among poor and underserved communities where the price of testing positive and losing your job is high.

“A poor Samoan grandmother in South Auckland is not going to download an app on her latest smartphone.”

Morgan said it would be up to New Zealanders if such cards needed to be made mandatory, but that should be an option for the Government.

“If everyone had a CovidCard now in their top draw, last night on TV the Prime Minister could have said ‘we want everyone carrying their Covid card from tomorrow in Auckland’.”

A Stuff reader poll on Wednesday indicated a potentially high acceptance for a mandatory requirement to carry a Covid tracing device.

Thirty-one per cent of respondents said they would rather be required to carry a CovidCard than wear a mask and 54 per cent said they would have no problem with either.

Anthony Dixon, chief executive of Wellington software firm Paperkite, which developed the Rippl contact tracing app, said having to wear the cards as a lanyard would be a big drawback.

Morgan said the cards would not work “at the bottom of a handbag” because the card might think it was 20 metres’ away from others.

“Unfortunately if you want technology that does this and has a battery life that might last for 12 months that is one of the constraints.”

Having the devices in the form of a wristband rather than a card might be possible, but that could have the trade-off of a shorter battery life, or a requirement to use a rechargeable battery, he said.

“Having a device you can ship to people and it ‘just works’ allows you to get to the right compliance levels.”

“The data was in” on the Health Ministry’s contract tracing app, Morgan said.

“We have the technology and no-one uses it. What more data do you need?”

Taylor, who was named Innovator of the Year at the New Zealander of the Year Awards last year, said he would like to see the cards named “the paddle” to reflect way they could help New Zealanders work as a “waka crew of 5 million” to combat the virus.

He was also disappointed there had not been faster progress on contact tracing.

“The team of 5 million does seem to be fraying a bit.

“It seems to me to be the solution. You can protect your businesses with an app and we have got one, but it doesn’t do the job of protecting the team of 5 million.

“It needs to be freely available to everyone.”

The cards would not need to know where people had been and did not need to have any information uploaded unless people contracted the virus, he pointed out.

Taylor believed people would wear the card with pride if it was set up right, but “ultimately if we truly want to protect everybody, you would make it compulsory”.

“Compulsory is the way we take care of everyone, but I’d love people to wear it with pride.

“We have got the slogan ‘go hard, and go fast’, but we are missing out ‘go smart’ as well.”

The cards could provide a solution to opening the border, which was a challenge that was not now being addressed, he said.