A N A LY S I S
As industries and governments scramble to find effective ways to limit the spread of Covid-19 while reopening economic activity, health passports have proven a hot topic and could play a key role in making events safer to attend. Pippa Naude investigates.
THE VIABILITY OF HEALTH PASSPORTS FOR EVENT ACCESS
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roponents praise them as an efficient screening tool; however, critics have voiced concerns over the unintended consequences they could lead to. So, what are health passports and could they be a means to ensuring safe event access? Also known as vaccine passports and health passes, health passports are essentially a record (paper or digital) that verifies information such as whether a person has been vaccinated against Covid-19, has tested negative for the virus and, in some cases, if they have had Covid-19 and therefore have some natural immunity against it. Having this information about an individual helps to assess the potential risk that they could transmit the virus, and so can be used to screen people before granting them access to a country, flight, event and more. Increasingly, the trend is for app-based digital health passports; the technology is available, and most people have a smartphone. Digital records are also harder
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to forge than paper documents and present a streamlined, touchless way to gather, store and share this data.
WHO HAS THEM, HOW DO THEY WORK?
Many countries, airlines, health organisations (including the WHO) and tech companies have started to develop health passports. IATA (International Air Transport Association) is making fast progress on its Travel Pass, which will soon be piloted in Singapore and New Zealand. The app includes a list of travel requirements per country, where tests can be done, as well as The Lab App, which is “a secure, encrypted channel that enables laboratories to verify passengers’ identities and then send the results of Covid-19 tests, or proof of vaccination, directly to passengers [to] store on their mobile device”. The Travel Pass is linked to a person’s passport, enabling their Covid-19 immunity status to be shared with the relevant authorities. IATA is hoping that
most countries and airlines will adopt the Travel Pass, thereby creating a standardised tool for international travel. The Health Passport Worldwide app is another example, which was used by Big Concerts to screen attendees for its Recharge 2020 event in Cape Town. In this case, rapid testing was conducted at registration. A person’s test results were sent to their app within 15 minutes of testing, and only those with a negative test result could enter the event. Health Passport Worldwide has since launched Health Passport South Africa, including a flagship Covid-19 testing centre at The Lookout Waterfront in Cape Town. The testing centre provides PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and rapid antigen tests and can test 275 people an hour. This can be upscaled to test over 50 000 people a day using rapid antigen testing. The aim, says the company, is to “enable businesses, events, travel, hospitality and much more to safely reopen”. It adds that
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