The range of action of the Italian contact tracing app Immuni widens: now you can use it also in Germany and Ireland, without having to download other apps
From next October 17 it will be possible to use Immuni also abroad. The app dedicated to the tracking of Coronavirus infections, introduced in Italy last June 15 after a two-week testing phase, will soon be able to interact with the databases of Germany and Ireland, allowing to discover any contacts with positive subjects even beyond national borders.
The news, coming directly from the European Commission, leaves room for further developments and expansions of the population involved in the constant observation of the pandemic still in progress. If the number of citizens who use contact tracing apps, as the EU itself hopes, continues to increase in the future, it will be possible to identify and block Covid-19 outbreaks in an even more rapid and targeted manner. This could also meet the monitoring needs of all those more complex situations where close contact between people, which is prohibited by current legislation in many European countries, cannot always be avoided altogether despite the attention and scrupulousness of those involved.
Immuni: how does the communication between apps work?
The first fundamental point is that, in order to access the databases of the European countries involved, it won't be necessary to install new applications on your smartphone: it will be enough to continue to use Immuni as on the Italian territory, all thanks to the Gateway system. In this way, moving within the European Union will become safer and you will not lose any potential contact with the virus.
In addition to the two nations already mentioned, there are 18 countries that have already adopted or are going to adopt contact tracing apps. In addition to Italy, Germany and Ireland, the countries are Austria, Croatia and Denmark, Estonia, France and Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Portugal. Soon, Belgium, Cyprus and Lithuania will also join the list. The goal is to create a sort of "roaming" of contact tracing, which works throughout Europe.
Immuni: the numbers in Italy
Since its launch last June, the Immuni app has been installed on 17% of phones currently in Italy. It is used daily by 6.6 million people, a number that does not include children under 14 years of age who were not included in the monitoring project. Talking about usefulness, there have been about 300 cases of contact identified through the use of the application and about 4500 notifications sent, a good number considering the possible outbreaks identified and immediately blocked.