If you want to travel in 2021, you may need a vaccine passport. “CommonPass”: to be able to return safely to travel and to life.
What everyone expects of 2021 is, of course, health first of all! Many people welcomed 2021 dreaming of the days when they would be able to travel, shop and go to the cinema again. But it has also been underlined at every opportunity that, in order to do these things, vaccination must first take place.
Along with the terms of use of the Hayat Eve Sığar application, companies and other technology groups, in order to gain a privileged position in their own fields of work, began developing smartphone applications or systems for people to upload the details of their Covid-19 tests and vaccinations. The entire infrastructure has been prepared for digital credentials that can be shown in order to enter concert halls, stadiums, cinemas, offices and even countries. Leading this preparation is the Common Trust Network, an initiative of the Geneva-based non-profit The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum. In other words: the Common Pass Application!
The Common Trust Network has partnered with many airlines, such as Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, as well as with hundreds of health systems. Together with the United Kingdom and the government of Aruba, the US is also among the first partners of this organisation. The Commons Project, the World Economic Forum and a broad coalition of public and private partners: a trusted, globally interoperable platform for people to document their COVID-19 status (health declarations / PCR tests / vaccinations).
With the Common Pass application created by the group, users’ medical data, such as a Covid-19 test result, together with a health certificate that can count as proof of vaccination carried out in a hospital or by a medical professional, will be uploaded in the form of a QR code to the CommonPass application on the smartphone. The application will be used in such a way that it can be shown to the authorities without disclosing all of a person’s private sensitive information. In short, this application will be the smart document of our newly formatted life, holding the information on our journey as a health card application at the points of departure and arrival according to your travel itinerary.
The statement made in the first press announcement by Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer of The Commons Project: “When travelling, you may face a PCR test requirement every time you cross a designated border. Every time you cross the border, if you have no vaccination certificate, you cannot be vaccinated at every point of your journey,” he said. Pointing out that in general we need proof of vaccination, he recalled the necessity of gathering all this health information, together with the proof of vaccination, in one application in the digital environment, so as not to encounter any mishap when, if you have been vaccinated, the paper vaccination certificate in your hand is required to be checked digitally.
The big technology firms have also gone into action. IBM has developed its own application, with a programme called “Digital Health Pass”, which allows companies and venues to customise the indicators they will require at all entrances, including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccination records . The credentials corresponding to these indicators will then be among the information kept under protection in a mobile wallet. The mobile wallet, for its part, is one of the novelties of our formatted life that we shall soon have to use under the roof of the Blockchain.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Apple and Google set aside their smartphone rivalry to develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users when they have been exposed to someone with Covid-19. Many countries and state governments around the world have also developed and rolled out their own applications. That is the very “Hayat Eve Sığar” we know, the application that makes one say “enough” of HES…
The aim of vaccine passports is to ensure that they are used by the masses in large numbers. They have of course also reckoned with the existence of the large subset of the global population that still does not use smartphones or has no access to them… Several companies, including some within the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative, have found a quicker solution to prevent checks based on traditional paper vaccination certificates from remaining outside the system. Work has begun on developing a smart digital identity card that could operate on a middle ground between that and an online version.
Lucy Yang, co-chair of the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative, gave the good news about the quick solution they have found, saying: “What matters to us is how these digital credentials can be stored; we are researching how they can be offered not only through smartphones but also in other ways for people who have no access to stable internet and no smartphone, and there are companies doing really promising work.”
With the prayer that the year 2021 may pass in HEALTH, PEACE and TRANQUILLITY for all humanity…
Translated from the Turkish original.