Several EU countries have their own variants in progress. Germany is expected to launch after Easter. In Norway, they are "99% done" and are just waiting for the Norwegian government to launch the app broadly for as many Norwegians as possible to download it.

- Clearly, many people need to download it in order to have a positive effect. The challenge is that the Norwegians trust that it will not be abused, says Kyrre Lekve, Deputy CEO of the State Simula Research Laboratory to SVT.

The app should be voluntary to download. The data is stored for 30 days and only the healthcare system should have access to it.

- It will be able to significantly improve infection detection. From the time a person is found infected, it only takes a few minutes before everyone who has had close contact with the person is told to quarantine.

Germany will have a similar app in progress for launch after Easter and several other EU countries are planning their own variants. In more authoritarian countries, digital infection tracking is often mandatory. But even the voluntary variants raise concerns among those who work with civil rights issues.

- If you don't question this, it will be a normality. We who work globally see that governments claim to be temporary solutions. But history has shown that repression in many contexts is also enduring, says Marcin de Kaminski of Civil Rights Defenders.

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Kyrre Lekve agrees that this is a "dramatic tool in a dramatic situation", but emphasizes that such an app also makes it easier to say even those who do not need to quarantine.

- With a more effective way of tracing infectious people, we can also make society work more again. You do not have to shut down an entire workplace just because someone there got sick in covid-19, with the app we also know then who can not have been infected.

On the question of whether Sweden has something similar going on, the Public Health Authority refers to the MSB, which says that "cooperation is going on around this with the actors involved, we will soon be able to tell more". According to SVT's sources, researchers are currently working on developing some form of Swedish Corona app.