According to their services announced this Monday, Draghi, 74, is infected with SARS-CoV-2, but is asymptomatic.
Sources from the Italian Government, meanwhile, told EFE that instead of the prime minister, the ministers of Foreign Affairs, Luigi di Maio, and of Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, are traveling to Angola and Congo Republic.
Draghi was due to arrive in Luanda on Wednesday, where he would meet with the President, João Lourenço, and the following day he would travel to the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, to also meet with the country's head of state, Denis Sassou N 'Guesso.
The trip is part of the Italian government's efforts to diversify energy imports, especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sources in the Italian executive told Spanish news agency Efe.
Italy imports almost all the gas it consumes from abroad, about 90 percent, and about 40 percent comes from Russian territory.
Last Monday, Draghi traveled to Algeria, his second gas supplier after Russia, and managed to sign an agreement to import more from that North African country.
Italy, connected to the outside by five pipelines, receives gas from Algeria through the Transmed pipeline, which starts in the Algerian Hassi R'Mel field, in the far north of the Sahara, crosses Tunisia and the sea and ends in Mazarra del Valley, Sicily.
Through this trans-Mediterranean channel, Italy received a total of 22,584 million cubic meters of gas in 2021 (in 1990 Italy imported half, 10,559 million cubic meters).
However, the Algerian gas pipeline has an even greater capacity, of up to 27 billion cubic metres, Italian Minister for Ecological Transition Roberto Cingolani, with energy responsibilities, declared in Parliament on 22 March.
As part of this strategy of supply diversification, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, spent the last few months in other countries such as Azerbaijan, from where in 2021 Italy received 7,214 million cubic meters of gas, through a pipe that crosses the Adriatic Sea, or Qatar, from where it imported 6,877 million.
In the last month and a half, Di Maio also traveled to the Republic of Congo, Angola and Mozambique, and assured that "all these countries have been available to increase the supply" of hydrocarbons.
