While we are waiting to understand if we will have to swab even when vaccinated and if other restrictions await us, it can be instructive to give look at the ranking of the most downloaded apps.
In the first place, for months, there is VerificationC19, the Ministry of Health‘s app to check Green Passes. But immediately after, in front of TikTok, YouTube and WhatsApp, there is Immuni. Do you remember Immuni? The contagion tracking app that at the beginning of the pandemic was launched with great expectations to contain the virus and then practically abandoned. The problem was that it worked, but when the bluetooth of the mobile phone registered a contact with a person positive for the virus, nothing happened; rather nothing happened even if you found out you were positive, because the doctors did not log the data on the app. An organizational and non-technological flop, despite the fact that at the time over 10 million people had installed the app.
When you understood what needed to be done (a dedicated call center and thousands of people dedicated to tracing the contacts of positives), it was too late: the cases were so many that it would have been impossible to register them. In short, Immuni was dead and buried. Then came the Green Pass and with it the choice to also use Immuni to be able to receive it. Result: Immune for months is one of the most downloaded apps, although for a different function from that declared, that is “Notify potentially infected users as soon as possible, even when they are asymptomatic”.
If Immuni worked, if we had made it work, if we had believed it, today we would not be talking about tampons even for vaccinated people. Why did it go like this? It is not a subject of digital mistrust, as demonstrated by the success of the Green Pass. But the Green Pass requires the citizen to make an effort (get vaccinated), Immuni required it from the State (set up a structure to keep track of infections).
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