Immuni, the application for tracking infections from COVID – 19, will have its own national call center. According to the Decree Refreshments which arrived yesterday in the Official Journal. It will be activated by the Ministry of Health and will be funded by a total of 4 million euros that will be available, one million immediately and three in the 2021.

In this case the arrival of the call center for Immuni is present in art. 20 of the new law where you can easily read that: ” The Ministry della Salute carries out contact tracing and health surveillance activities as well as information and accompaniment to the prevention and assistance services of the competent local health companies. To this end, the Ministry of Health activates a national telephone and telematic support service for people who have tested positive for the SARS-Cov-2 virus , who have had close or casual contact with found subjects positive or who have received an alert notification through the Immuni application , whose data are made accessible to upload the key code in the presence of a positive case. To this end, the data relating to cases diagnosed with the SARS-Cov-2 virus are made available to the aforementioned national service, also through the Health Card System or through interoperability systems ”.

Immune: how will the call center?

We already know how the application of works) Immune that we have explained in detail in our article. In this case the introduction of the call center is a very important step to make the app was even more effective, given that in the first months of activation, the difficulty involved reporting the positives on the app.

In this case in fact the indication of the positive patient in the application of Immuni occurs only and exclusively if a healthcare professional loads the user’s unique key. The problem was just being able to contact a healthcare professional who could load the patient’s positivity key and therefore activate the procedure for notifying all users who had been in the vicinity of the positive patient. In this case, the new Decree does not explain the procedure and above all who will physically create this call center since both the Ministry of Health and the Extraordinary Emergency Commissioner are included in the Decree. In fact, however with a call center it is clear that the assistance to the positive patient can only make the notification system easier and faster. Immune app.

Immune: record of contact notifications

At the same time the Ministry of Health communicated the data on the progress of the Immuni application. The application currently sees a total of 9 downloads . 43 millions of downloads with one record of notifications sent equal to more than 41. 426 and with 1. 673 COVID positive users – 19. In this case, the record for the number of notifications of possible exposure sent by the application was also recorded and equal to 5. 195 with a peak of users for the 27 October equal to 143.

It is important to underline that in the middle of October, the Immuni app reached the download threshold necessary for the entire system to be effective in tracing infections. The percentage of the Italian population who today own Immuni on their smartphone is equal to 16%. And it is also important to know that it is not so much the number of people who have downloaded the application that makes it effective but the system still put in place with a minimum percentage of downloads. And precisely the threshold of the 15% (exceeded in Italy) allows to reduce, according to scientific studies, infections and deaths.

Electronic Health Card System: it will become fundamental

Also important is the electronic transfer of the Health Card System which will become Yes, because in this case the Ristori decree seems to give fundamental weight to the citizen’s Health Card precisely for the communication of the results of the swabs . According to the art. 19 of decree will allow doctors to ” prepare the electronic report relating to the swab performed, with the indication of the relative results, of the contact, as well as any additional information necessary for epidemiological surveillance ”.

A step that will allow, thanks to the Electronic Health Card, to have ” immediate electronic report in the Electronic Health Record or also in the Integrated Health Card System at regional level.