In the UK, the summer holiday season is approaching, and a realization is dawning…
The government aims to provide official proof of vaccination for millions of British holidaymakers this summer – starting as early as 17 May.
According to a report in the Telegraph, a government official told travel bosses on the Tourism Industry Emergency Response Group: “We aim to give people the ability to prove their vaccine status by the time international travel restarts where other countries require it.”
Many nations have said that official evidence of vaccination from tourists will enable or smooth visits.
The story concludes with a brief note on international coordination of formats, etc, and issues of cybersecurity.
I’m starting to really like the idea of a vaccine passport. If you look at the vaccinations/day in the US, it’s dropping pretty fast, even as more and more people (all people over 16 now) are eligible.
Wait, you say, maybe that’s because the J&J vaccine was put on hold. I would love to think that, but looking at available appointments in NJ, there are many available every day. A few months ago, I had to wait weeks to get the first shot, but my son (newly eligible) got an appointment on Tuesday for Wednesday, with plenty to choose from.
So, if a vaccine passport could encourage holdouts to get vaccines, I’m all for it. I’m really tired of wearing masks, staying locked down, etc. If we don’t get to 80% or so, we might never reach herd immunity, all the while cooking up variants that are deadlier or more transmissible, or both.
We have the Corona passports here, here being Denmark.
To go to a pub, restaurant, amusement park or hairdresser and a lot of other things, you have to show a negative corona test less than 72 hours old, a finished vaccine or proof that you have had corona less than 12 weeks ago and have been tested negative afterwards.
There have been surprisingly few complaints, the complaints have been about the rule that you have to reserve a table 30 minutes before, both in pubs and restaurants.
In ten days time, I will be able to get my English vaccine passport (version 1.0).
Published today.
From 17 May, you may be able to show your COVID-19 vaccination status as proof of your status when travelling abroad.
There are not many countries that currently accept proof of vaccination. So for the time being most people will still need to follow other rules when travelling abroad – like getting a negative pre-departure test…
…You can access your COVID-19 vaccination status through the free NHS App from 17 May. You can access the app through mobile devices such as a smartphone or by tablet. Proof of your COVID-19 vaccination status will be shown within the NHS App. We recommend that you register with the app before booking international travel.
If you do not have access to a smartphone and know that the country you are travelling to requires COVID-19 vaccination status, you can call the NHS helpline on 119 (from 17 May) and ask for a letter to be posted to you. This must be at least 5 days after you’ve completed your course of the vaccine. We expect the letter to take up to 5 days to reach you.
So for international travel out of England, I think it is now fair to say that the vaccine passport is now a done deal. The smartphone option has been much discussed, as has the issue of how a smartphone-only arrangement would be obviously unfair. As expected, it is smartphone based but with workarounds for non-users. (BTW, I upgraded my phone about a month ago in order to be able to use this new technology).
I assume that as this approach becomes more widely available, more countries will rely more heavily on this sort of proof of vaccination to facilitate travel.
The matter of internal use (ie, demonstration of vaccination status to use restaurants, cinemas etc in England) has not been addressed in this update.
Do we have further status updates for other countries?
A province in the Philippines plans to implement a system which is not exactly a vaccine passport, but rather a contact tracing system involving a card and a QR code. No card, no entry. Don’t hold your breath though. It sounds expensive and the Philippines is a poor nation. What is said is frequently not done.
I now have a Vaccine Passport. I thought it might be of interest to describe setting it up and how it works. The Vaccine Passport – it says that it is intended to support travel abroad – is a smartphone application which has been available since the 17th May, but I gave it a week just in case. If there had been major problems with it, I was happy to let someone else find that out.
There’s an app for everything these days. There’s a NHS (National Health Service) app, which allows you to schedule doctor’s appointments, re-order prescriptions and so forth; and the passport has been added to that. So, having downloaded the NHS app, you have to set the vaccine passport up. You enter personal data – name, DOB, NHS number, address, email address and so on. The personal information allows the app to find your medical records on the NHS IT system. You can limit cookies to essential only. The app then uses your phone camera three times. (1) – it takes a picture of your face; (2) – you have to take a photo of an item of photo ID – passport, driving licence etc (there are workarounds if you have no photo ID); (3) it does some weird facial recognition thing to confirm that your face matches the photo ID. If it’s all in order, you’re set up and good to go.
To use the passport (“Share Your COVID-19 Status - View and share proof of your COVID-19 status for travel”) you enter email and password (you can do fingerprint or facial recognition instead). It pings you a 6 digit code; you enter the code; and the passport consists of a screen showing your details, vaccination history and a big matrix code (which says that it expires 20th June).
And there I run out of information. Mrs T got her phone and tried to read the code – it isn’t readable. I guess you have to have the right software installed to read it. I presume the code takes you to the photo taken when the app was setting up, to verify whose status – and indeed passport – this is.
Several Presidential proclamations established restrictions on the entry of certain travelers into the United States in an effort to help slow the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
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With specific exceptions, several Presidential proclamations suspend and limit entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of noncitizens who were physically present within the following countries during the 14-day period preceding their entry or attempted entry into the United States. For a full list of exceptions, please refer to the relevant proclamations in the links below.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot for reasons that are maybe dumb and selfish, but here goes.
Typically, I travel from Canada to the U.K. every couple of years. My personal style of travel is four days in this city, three days here, a few days there, take the train between cities, and fly back from a different city from which I landed. A real hit-and-git style or cramming a lot of living into the vacation that I only get to take once every 18-24 months and for which I’ve been diligently saving up.
Since I’ve covered so much of the U.K. already, my plan for the next trip was to spend just a few days in London visiting friends, then heading over to mainland Europe: quick hit to Amsterdam, a few German cities, fly back from Paris. I had a plane ticket for this past October; by late March of 2020 I already know that was kaput. So I’m planning May of 2022, as there’s a comicon over in London I love, and I figure I’d start there.
But, a year out, I’m already paranoid about travel restrictions screwing me up. And I know the world will look very different in eleven months, but right now various countries are requesting rapid antigen tests done within 72 hours of crossing their borders and I’m thinking, am I going to be wasting a day at every stop trying to get a quick test, even if I’m fully vaccinated as I’ll be by the end of July this year? Will Europe be a weird patchwork of requirements? Worst of all, will the Canadian government totally screw the pooch on adopting some system of vaccine passport that’s acceptable overseas? I have a sinking feeling that next March we’ll hear that the Trudeau government farmed out a multimillion dollar contract to some consultant and it’s in the works and will be ready sometime in 2024.
Maybe everything will be much more open in May of next year, closer to the way things used to be. But today’s chaos gives me that queasy feeling.
So you’re saying that you like to travel in a manner that, if you were infected, would be optimized for spreading contagious disease to the largest possible number of people in the shortest possible time. And then you’re asking if this style of travel is more likely to be impacted by measures designed to stop the spread of a deadly pandemic?
Excuse the snark, but the answer is, unsurprisingly, “yes”.
(ETA: I am replying in the spirit of your user name!)
More constructively, if you like that kind of travel, and you have been fully vaccinated so you are not in fact a risk to yourself or others, maybe just adapt to minimize flying and to minimize crossing borders (other than initial arrival and departure) , since that’s where the hold-ups are likely to be. There’s a vast amount to see and do in just Italy, for example, all close together by Canada/US standards. You could do the kind of improvised city-hopping trip that you’re talking about quite easily just by car/train, all within northern Italy, and not run out of things to see and do in a month.
I’m hoping that when the border between Canada and the U.S. is opened again, that part of the world will be close to normal. And hopefully there will be some sort of international standard for a vaccine passport, so I can get my vaccinated self into the U.S. from Switzerland and not have to 1) get tested and 2) spend days or weeks in quarantine.
As a U.S. citizen, I can travel to the U.S. But still subject to the same restrictions.
I’m already looking at skipping some of the countries I’d hoped to see, maybe spending the bulk of my time within just Germany.
Like I said, it’s a year out and the world may (has to) look very different by then. But I can’t help but look ahead. I’ve fared comparatively well throughout the last sixteen months: I never stopped working, every time I got tested it was negative, I’ve had my first shot and I’m due for my second in six weeks or so. So I feel pretty well-off, all things considering. That said…I’m single and have been solo in a two-room apartment this whole time, and I’m dealing with family members five hours away starting to show signs of dementia, whom I can’t visit. So among that stress, I can’t help but look to the future, to the first actual living I can do once the world opens up enough. Planning this junk, and hence worrying about it based on what international precautions are like today, a full year in advance may seem crazy, but it’s really all I can do to keep myself going.
I’m fairly optimistic about where we’ll be by next year if you’re thinking about wealthier countries that will have their populations largely vaccinated this year. The data on all aspects of vaccine efficacy seem to be getting better and better.
California started up an online proof of Covid vaccination. I just signed up for it.
It’d be great if they had online versions of the old-school vaccination cards that are necessary for travel to a lot of different countries. I traveled pretty extensively 20 years ago and I seem to have misplaced mine.
Cook County, IL just sent me an email that I could request a QR code confirming my vaccination status to be sent to me. So I did, although I was somewhat confused - I had signed up for vaccination notifications from Cook County, but ultimately got vaccinated at the United Center, which was a Federally run site. So I did receive a QR code, but when I tried to read it, I just got taken back to the Cook County vaccination website.
You might think their systems would be sophisticated enough to know who had actually gotten vaccinated using the County-issued code, but then you’d be wrong.
