Welcome to our dystopian infernal landscape, where you will soon have to show your Apple Wallet when trying to enter an airport to prove you received the vaccine for covid-19.
According to a recent Bloomberg report, this is the reality faced by Los Angeles residents, where a recent partnership between Apple and the Healthvana wellness app could soon mean that vaccination records will be offered digitally in an attempt to (hopefully) encourage people to inoculate themselves. Since the virus that causes covid-19 requires a dose of two injections, the logic says, having a record of the first injection stored digitally can help ensure that individuals are eliminated immediately. for the second chance – and it can eventually serve as proof that an individual trying to access a supermarket or venue has been vaccinated.
Los Angeles recently broke its own record of covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations, leaving health officials struggling to establish a vaccine distribution plan “as soon as possible,” said Claire Jarashow, director of vaccines and preventable disease control. County Department of Public Health.
While vaccines will be formally screened in registries and patients will receive paper-based tracking cards, Jarashow said health officials have also seen a benefit in giving patients access to their digital records, which will have the benefit of being more difficult to lose.
“We are really concerned. We really want people to go back to the second dose, ”Jarashow told Bloomberg. “We just don’t have the capacity to handle hundreds of requests for medical records to find people’s first doses and when they need to get the second.”
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Although some patients are probably afraid to turn in their doctors protected data for some app, Healthvana CEO Ramin Bastani says the company stores its data on Amazon Web Services’s HIPAA compliant servers, making the app “as secure as possible,” according to Jarashow.
“Personally, I would feel comfortable using it, so I hope it is comforting,” she added.
According to Bloomberg, Healthvana is also in talks with Los Angeles County concert halls, employers and schools about applying this technology –“Anyone who has a large number of people interacting with them,” says Bastani, although he adds that he is skeptical that the app will become the de facto way of identifying his vaccination status.
“It won’t be like a credit card that you can use in the United States,” Bastani says. “Sometimes you can pay cash, sometimes you can use your Apple Wallet.”