Travelers may have to have a COVID vaccination passport next year if they want to spend the long-awaited vacation abroad or travel abroad, period. Currently, APPs are being developed to assist in this effort.
The first vaccination of many for front-line medical personnel for COVID-19 was administered on December 14 to intensive care nurse Sandra Lindsay in Brooklyn, New York. According to the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the next rounds of vaccines will be called Phase 1b and 1c.
Phase 1b will be administered to essential workers, such as firefighters, police officers, correctional officers, food and agricultural workers, United States Postal workers, manufacturing workers, grocery workers, public transport workers and those working in the education sector.
Phase 1c will be for anyone with underlying health problems and anyone over 65 years of age. Other essential workers will also be included. Transport and logistics, food, construction and housing financing, information technology, communications, energy, law, media, public safety and public health will be part of this group.
With thousands more vaccinated, there are still those who are not on the list and health officials are concerned about the possibility of contributing to the spread of the virus if they travel outside the United States
A non-profit organization based in Geneva, The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum have partnered with airlines to create the Common Trust Network to develop an application that can show whether a person has been vaccinated or not.
“The availability of reliable and verifiable health status information, including test results and vaccination records, can help governments implement more flexible and risk-based policies and develop a more reliable assessment of health status. of individuals as part of a multi-tiered risk management approach, ”states the Common Trust website.
The CommonPass app allows vaccinates to upload their medical data to show the result of the COVID-19 test or confirmation of a vaccine when it becomes more widely available.
“The Common Trust Framework is designed to give governments the ability to flexibly publish their country and other travel rules to evolve with the pandemic and science,” said Paul Meyer, CEO of the Commons Project in a statement. “If governments are able to rely on health status information originating in other countries, they can use policies that are more different than border closure and mandatory quarantine for incoming passengers.”
The CommonPass application is not the only software being developed as a health aid. IBM has the Digital Health Pass that does a similar job, but focuses more on companies and locations, being able to customize indicators that would allow entry to websites. This includes COVID-19 tests, temperature checks and vaccination records.
However, this new pass system can have its disadvantages and exclude people who will not have access to the vaccine in the future and civil liberties experts warn that the technology can create an invasive system of social control, according to an interview with Professor Michele Goodwin in The New York Times.
Goodwin heads the University of California’s Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and said that this form of technology could be used as a substitute for discrimination. She added that public health has historical precedence for discrimination.
There is an example of a vaccine passport, the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis, also known as Yellow Passport, is a medical passport issued by the World Health Organization.