In a major success for the Government's COVID-19 containing efforts, the contact tracing application, Aarogya Setu, has helped the authorities identify the presence of more than 650 hotspots in the country, and another 300 emerging hotspots which could have otherwise been missed, reports Economic Times.

The development has been made public by NITI Aayog's chief executive Amitabh Kant. Elaborating on the success, he shared that in Maharashtra alone, the application helped identify more than 60 hotspots spread across 18 districts of the State.

At pan India level, Kant shared that just between 13-20 April, the application had forecast 130 hotspots at sub-post office level, which were later confirmed and declared real hotspots by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).

He added, “This way, the engine helped the government with "whom to test" and "where to test more" against the coronavirus."

With more than 90 million registered users, Kant shared that application has been used by more than 69 million people to take self-assessment test of whom over 3.4 million have declared themselves as unwell since they were found to be showing one or more than three symptoms.

To act upon this, a dedicated team of over 70 healthcare workers has also reached out to about 6,50,000 people who had been identified to have two or more symptoms.

Meanwhile, Kant also shared that at least 12,500 users of the application were detected to have contracted the virus.