All travelers wishing to fly to the USA must provide proof of Covid-19 negative test. For the time being, this test takes the form of printing a test result or a photo of that result – creating opportunities for misunderstandings or possible fraud. Newly launched digital initiatives hope to clear up any ambiguity, standardize information and share it safely.
International travel is likely to be the first industry to employ new digital passports. One of the first flights to test a new “digital passport” incorporated with vaccination information and test results took off on Thursday morning, a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Istanbul.
Passengers log in to the Travel Pass app using FaceID on their smartphones and then take a selfie to authorize access. They can then scan your passport using the phone’s camera. From there, passengers can add their itinerary, vaccination certificates and Covid-19 test results.
As part of this test, passengers in Doha can go to a local medical center, which will send test results directly to the app. The app shows a green checkmark to say that you are ready to travel. Airlines also have access to the back-end system, allowing contactless and paperless verification.
“What you are going to do is give people and the authorities confidence that your documentation is correct that you have been vaccinated. You don’t have to carry pieces of paper, which you can lose and conflict with the authorities, ”Qatar Airways Group CEO Akbar Al Baker told NBC News.
Both the International Air Transport Association, which developed the Travel Pass, and the airlines that use it, claim that the Travel Pass will follow strict data privacy restrictions.
“It will also give you the confidence, as a passenger, that the data you put in the system will stay on your smartphone and will not be shared with anyone else,” said Al Baker.
More than a dozen airlines have signed up to test the pass, including Emirates, Singapore Airlines and Qantas. The pass will officially debut in late March.
Some governments and airlines have started to make their own applications or allow other digital systems. British Airways and low-cost airline Ryanair have begun allowing passengers to carry their Covid-19 and vaccination test results along with their other personal booking information when booking online. But Al Baker said that having a wide variety of digital passport formats is not ideal.
“We want it to be a standard form accepted by the entire world airport community and the immigration community,” said Al Baker.
Without the ability to rely on Covid-19 tests – and, eventually, vaccine records – many countries will feel compelled to maintain the total travel ban and mandatory quarantines.
For international travel, governments are likely to require some kind of proof of vaccination in the near future, similar to the way some countries now require vaccines for other illnesses, like yellow fever or polio, airline executives say. But there are currently no plans to apply them on domestic flights.
“I don’t see this happening in the United States,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian told NBC News in a recent interview.
United and American Airlines are part of the IATA Travel Pass advisory group, providing information for the development of the application, but neither confirmed when it will test the feature.
In October, a United flight from London to Newark tested a smartphone-based system with Covid-19 status called CommonPass.
“Without the ability to rely on Covid-19 tests – and, eventually, vaccine records – across international borders, many countries will feel compelled to maintain the total travel ban and mandatory quarantines as long as the pandemic persists,” said the Dr. Bradley Perkins, chief medical officer of The Commons Project, the creator of the nonprofit digital platform that developed the system, in a statement.
“With reliable individual health data, countries can implement more differentiated health screening requirements for entry,” said Perkins.
In January, President Joe Biden issued an executive order asking government agencies to “assess the feasibility of linking Covid-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis” and the ability to make digital versions.
On Monday, Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the Covid de Biden task force, said the government has a set of guiding principles on vaccine passports, but does not believe the data should be kept by the government.
Several private sector initiatives are underway, including a partnership between technology companies like Microsoft and Oracle and healthcare organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Change Healthcare and Evernorth.
“It needs to be private; the data must be secure; access to it must be free of charge; it must be available digitally and on paper, and in several languages; and it must be open source, ”said Slavitt.
Air travel has plummeted in the United States by up to 60 percent as blocking orders and travel restrictions have restricted non-essential travel.
Rays of hope have begun to emerge as vaccinations have increased and infection rates have generally dropped, although flattening rates and even the increase in some areas are causing concern. Airlines boasted their highest passenger levels last weekend.
Advocates for privacy and human rights are concerned that requiring a digital vaccination passport could create an unfair two-tier system between those who have easy access to them and vaccines and those who do not.
Air travel vaccine passports are in danger of creating “inequity” and “false guarantees of public security,” said Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, in an email.
Liberty, the UK’s largest civil liberties organization, warned in a statement: “It is impossible to have immunity passports that do not result in human rights abuses.”