Dr Mark Parrish, regional medical director of Northern Europe, International SOS
This summer, as the pandemic and vaccination programmes continue, health passes are playing a critical role in opening up travel. But will showing your health status on your smartphone become a part of the new normal and long-term future of travel, like showing your passport or boarding pass?
Health passes essentially provide an authenticated health credential for individuals, verified by a third-party. Using a health pass, travellers can therefore prove their compliance with any given Covid policy and/or regulation, allowing them to move more freely across and/or within national borders.
Despite ongoing concerns and lingering controversy, health passes are increasingly being seen as an effective risk mitigation strategy by governments and health authorities around the world. They allow a safer, more efficient and controlled return to both domestic and international travel by ensuring travellers comply with whatever restrictions remain in place in one form or another – such as specific testing and/or vaccination requirements.
We are already seeing their effectiveness in enabling people to enjoy more freedoms, in environments not just limited to travel. In late June and early July, the UK's Wimbledon tennis Championships effectively used the NHS app to ensure a Covid-safe event, while the UK Prime Minister appears keen for bars and nightclubs to adopt them to ensure those venues can operate safely. Additionally, many workplaces are also looking into their use. As the benefits of these passports are recognised and concerns around ethics and data privacy are allayed, it is likely they will become commonplace in our daily lives in 2021 and 2022.
Indeed, they will be fundamental to new rules
allowing fully vaccinated travellers from many European countries and
the United States to enter England without quarantining, for example.
For this to work, the UK government is accepting the EU's Digital Covid
Certificate (DCC) as proof of vaccination.
The EU has already said that its pass will be in place for a year from its inception on July 1. Currently, it is difficult to see a time when we can travel freely without them. Exactly how long they are here for will depend on the success of the vaccination programmes and vaccine uptake amongst populations.
Countries with low vaccination rates may require them for longer if the levels of infection remain high, while countries with high vaccination rates will likely be concerned about importing variants from abroad. Another big factor is how long the vaccines grant immunity for. If we are required to have regular booster shots, there could be a situation where health passports are with us indefinitely to prove vaccination status.
As health passes become widely accepted, their use case could also potentially expand to cover other vaccinations and health entry requirements for travel. For example, they might replace existing systems which prove yellow fever vaccinations, required for some countries.
If the passports are to be effective, there will likely need to be some standardisation to ensure universal recognition and a smooth traveller experience.
Currently, there is a highly fragmented field of digital health pass solutions being developed asynchronously across geographies, using widely differing technical, operational and commercial frameworks. However, at a global level a very small number of prominent digital health pass systems are now emerging, such as the one International SOS has developed with the International Chamber of Commerce, AOKpass.
As of June 2021, it has been used in over 500 commercial flights across 18 countries, achieving passenger adoption rates of up to 86 per cent on some routes. Use of AOKpass is supporting a return in traveller confidence and allowing airports and airlines to implement processes that prioritise health and safety while also ensuring efficiency and security. Concerns around medical privacy and data protection are managed through the use of blockchain technology, which ensures passenger confidentiality is protected.
In the short term, however, it is likely that digital pass systems will remain fragmented. In the United States there are multiple different systems for certifying Covid status, showing how complex achieving universal agreement is likely to be in the near future. Looking over a longer timeframe, consolidation will occur and allow more universal recognition of different health systems, so it’s likely that twelve months from now we will have a more-consolidated framework.
From there, whether their use will need to continue or not remains to be seen. Perhaps in the future vaccination status could even be integrated into advanced passenger information (APIS) if verification issues could be overcome.
What we do know is that with increased global connectivity and urbanisation this will not be the only pandemic or epidemic that the world will face in coming years. Having a global system for verifying health status can only be a good thing in helping us emerge from the Covid-19 crisis, as well as ensuring we’re prepared for any other pandemics that the future might bring.