There is also the Immune app in Draghi's first DPCM

Yesterday evening the new DPCM (pdf) was presented which will come into force on 6 March, with validity until 6 April: this is the first intervention signed by Mario Draghi for the containment of the pandemic and, despite the obvious breaking points in formal terms compared to the previous executive, there are also strong lines of continuity at a substantial level. One point, in particular, is clearly inherited and postponed: despite the fall of Pisano, despite the replacement of Arcuri, the Immuni app remains present in the Italian anti-Covid plan.

Immuni is in the DPCM

The app is mentioned in art. 5, where the "information and prevention measures throughout the national territory" are indicated. The article states:

in order to make contact tracing more effective through the use of the Immune App, the health worker of the Prevention Department of the local health company is obliged to access the central Immune, to upload the key code in the presence of a case of positivity

Words that, to be honest, sound out of tune. Immuni is in fact carried out with the burden of a mandatory reporting on the part of health workers, something that in over a semester of experience has never been able to develop. The text is, however, ambiguous, since if it is necessary to report the positivity by the health worker, then the usefulness of the call center created specifically to solve this problematic junction that has largely hindered the establishment of the app is no longer useful. .

In some ways it is as if the DPCM were even taking a step backwards, restoring Immuni even in a moment in which its usefulness now seems completely declassified: 10.3 million Italians have downloaded it, almost 13 thousand the positive results reported (a few dozen a day), 91 thousand notifications sent and the pace of activity now at a glance.

Yet during yesterday's press conference, without ever making any direct reference, Dr. Brusaferro, President of the Superior Health Council, recalled how tracing has returned to being fundamental: it allows the new variants to be isolated with greater incidence, trying to slow down their evolution and therefore facilitate new accelerations of infections. As if to say: if we had Immuni spread over the territory, it would help the meager tracking possibilities that the health authority can provide with its own strength.

Contact tracing that was not

With "ifs" and "buts", however, there is no contact tracing: Immune in fact there is and there is no more time to relaunch it. Why then include it in the DPCM? Probably it is a “residue” of the past, on which no more will be bet, but which would be deleterious to cancel as it proved to be valid even if not used. The text with which Immuni carries on, however, reiterates that reporting obligation that has not only always been ignored up to now, but which has represented the main vulnerability of the whole project.