Credit: Telegraph
Holidaymakers will face tougher travel restrictions, the health secretary Matt Hancock said this week, warning: "We can’t risk the progress we have made."
His comments come ahead of a Cabinet committee meeting today which is expected to order that arrivals to the UK must quarantine for 10 days in hotels in bid to stop mutant Covid strains entering Britain.
Any such order will not only be a brutal blow to the airline industry, but also to the millions of holidaymakers looking forward to some respite from the monotony of lockdown.
There is, however, cause for optimism. Vaccine passports, hailed as a ticket to freedom, could eventually open up travel once again for the masses — and they are gaining global acceptance.
Right now, "every airline is looking at this," says Alan Murray Hayden, from the International Air Transport Association (IATA). "The thing is, they know that they can’t [check every passenger] manually. We have to have a way of actually automating the checking of both the vaccine and the test results, or our industry won’t start flying again."
Already, carriers such as Qantas, Emirates, Etihad and American Airlines have unveiled their own plans. United Airlines, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Swiss International Air Lines and JetBlue have said they will be adopting “CommonPass” digital health-passports for testing information, which are expected to eventually include vaccination status.
The aim is to ultimately “give all governments the confidence to re-open borders to travellers based on verified vaccine and testing data,” says IATA.
Roll-outs of technology to do this are happening. Last weekend, American Airlines launched its “health passport” technology, an app called Verifly where users can put in their destinations and then upload Covid-19 tests and other health documentation, which can then be verified.
The vaccine passport projects funded by InnovateUK
Emirates and Etihad, meanwhile, have announced they would be adopting Travel Pass, a system which is also being trialled by British Airways and which has been developed by IATA, where travellers can store and manage certifications for Covid-19 tests or vaccines.
Other airlines are expected to soon follow suit and introduce their own systems. Robert Grigg, a policy and public affairs director at industry group Airlines UK, whose members include easyJet and Ryanair, says it’s “absolutely the case that we’ll need technology or apps like the IATA Travel Pass that can record either vaccination or test status, to help facilitate travel and border processes and requirements in a joined up way”.
“Undoubtedly we’ll be seeing other carriers looking to roll out this and similar technology,” he says, although cautions that the body “does not support a mandatory requirement to be vaccinated before travel”.
There are many options available. Across the world, scores of projects are underway to develop vaccine passports, looking at different ways that someone’s vaccine status can be linked to their identity, with the Telegraph revealing this weekend that the Government had funded at least eight schemes in the space.
Among those receiving a grant was EYN, a British company which is now understood to be in talks with a number of airlines over its technology. The firm is working on vaccine passports that rely on QR codes that can be printed out for those without smartphones, removing the need for anybody to have access to a technology, but allowing companies to scan people and find out what someone’s vaccination status is.
Hasan Sheikh Faridul, chief executive of EYN, says the idea behind this was around “how can we reach 100pc of the population”.
But, for travel, it is still a little “all over the place”.
“If most of the people in a given country are vaccinated, and they are truly protected, why would they ask for a vaccine passport? Did we ask for a vaccine passport for polio before the pandemic? But, at the same time, it takes time to vaccinate the population and it’s not evident that such vaccination will produce herd immunity against all variants of SARS-CoV-2.”
In his view, this means there “might be an intermediate period where a vaccine passport against SARS-CoV-2 is useful for international travel”. It is not yet clear on how long this period will last.
QR codes aren’t the only option for those looking for vaccine passport ideas. VST Enterprises has developed a system that relies on what is known as V-Code, which uses a circular barcode instead of the square one used for QR codes — something the company says makes it more secure.
VST is in talks with SkyTeam, Malaysian Airlines and Sri Lankan Airlines over the technology which, when scanned, can provide vaccination data about individuals, and is also understood to have spoken to British Airways.
Other concepts include linking biometrics with individuals’ vaccine status, so people do not have to carry digital or paper certificates with them. IATA is also considering whether web check-ins for flights could offer those without smartphones a way to verify their test results and vaccinations.
Vaccine passports
But, questions remain over how reliable vaccine passports can be. After all, can those systems which rely on individuals inputting their own vaccine history be trusted, when many people may simply be keen to be allowed to travel again?
iProov, which is working with Mvine on a vaccine certificate, weeks away from public trials, says it is important this data is fool-proof.
Its system, a free app where users can prove they have received the vaccine, requires those vaccinating individuals to essentially create the certificate, so it can be verified. IATA’s Travel Pass does a similar thing, whereby those labs offering Covid tests or vaccinations will be the ones verifying the certificate.
“I don’t know how others are doing it, but this is one of two solutions. The other is that information comes out of the NHS systems or Public Health England which is perfectly feasible but it requires a political decision to make that available,” says iProov boss Andrew Bud.
Whether that decision will be made will largely depend on the public’s reaction, Bud says. Much of the policy around this is being steered by the response to smaller-scale trials. “Allowing a number of initiatives to take root and to sound out public opinion is the right thing to do,” Bud says.
For now, the Government maintains that it has “no plans” for a vaccine passport rollout. For one thing, whether vaccinations mean less transmissibility of Covid-19 is still up in the air.
But, Bud says, it “reduces vulnerability, and it may be that what it actually does is reduce the risk that organisations like airlines run in putting groups of people together”.
The next few months may prove difficult for carriers. But, if vaccine passports can be proved to be successful, there may finally be light at the end of the tunnel. And for airlines, it couldn’t come soon enough.
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