There is a lot of talk about pingdemia, the health app ping epidemic of England and Wales. Practically tens of thousands of people every day they are receiving a report that they have been in contact with a person who later discovered to be positive. And so they have to go into solitary confinement for a few days and then take a test.
This is having important effects: many workers, having to isolate themselves, cannot go to work and therefore various businesses are suffering, some have closed temporarily. Blame the app, it was said. It seems surreal to me. The app we are talking about is our Immuni (but with some more services that have favored a greater adoption). For Immuni the problem, it has been said for a long time, is that it did not work, the positivity was not reported and therefore the alert was not triggered capable of interrupting the chain of infections. It was, and unfortunately still is, totally useless as a tool to combat a pandemic.
In the United Kingdom the opposite is happening: contacts at risk are reported as evidenced by what is happening these days making it possible to slow down the spread of the virus, counteract the fourth wave. This is what we’re talking about, not a bug with a poorly designed app: in the United Kingdom there have been over 40 thousand daily cases for days, in Italy we are alarmed for yesterday’s 3558 (strongly increasing). In short, we are in the phase of the ostrich: no vaccine, all piled up in the stadiums for the Europeans and if I then have a contact with a positive, it is the fault of an app.
Meanwhile in the UK it has been established that from August 16, those who have had the double dose of vaccine can not do the quarantine. In Italy I would start to seriously ask myself if it is not the case to make Immuni work before the fourth wave arrives here too.
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