Arcuri: 'App ready in late May. It only serves if we make timely swabs'

The 'Immuni' contact tracing app is expected to be ready by the end of May. This was said by Commissioner for Emergency Domenico Arcuri at the hearing of the Transport and Telecommunications Commission. "At the end of the month, the App will be ready to be used," he said, stating however that "it is my opinion": "the interlocutors who can resolve this dilemma are others". "We have to do many more swabs, I have to put the regions in a position to make them", supplying them. The App works if the crossing time (from the alert to the buffer, ed) will be shortened and if it is accompanied by the administration of the only agent to identify an infected person, which is the buffer, "he added." The App has in order to make the nature, size and population of the infections faster and more certain. If you do not swab immediately, the App does not achieve the result for which it was designed, "said Arcuri." The App gives an alert to a device, to a phone, and says to it 'you have been in contact for more than 15 minutes in the last 14 days with another device - it too is not a name - that is infected '. The receiver of the device must activate and if the regional health system is not able to quickly submit a swab, it has not done its job and none of us have done it ". 

So far, 3.7 million tampons have been distributed to regional health systems and "in the coming weeks we will give another 5 million tampons, which have already been acquired," said the Commissioner for Emergency, stressing that it is however necessary that "systems regional health professionals subject the highest number of citizens to tampons. " And for this, he added, "I suggest you look at the data of the swabs for each region and you will discover important asymmetries. And I suggest you divide the number of swabs made in each region by the number of inhabitants of that region and you will discover other asymmetries We can only make tampons available, not give them to citizens. "

By 31 December 2020 all personal data processed for the contact tracing App must be deleted or permanently anonymized "explained Arcuri in a video audition. We speak of" pseudo-anonymized "data (a technique that consists in the processing of personal data in such a way that they can no longer be attributed to a specific person without additional information ', Arcuri quoted). "The term definitively anonymous if not related to pseudoanonymised is not well understood - he concluded by replying to the commissioners -. We do not do a service to anyone in saying that the data is not anonymous. The data are anonymous or as stated in the pseudo-anonymised rule ".