Saturday, August 29, 2020

From Those Wonderful Folks Who Bring Us Davos: "Could this COVID-19 ‘health passport’ be the future of travel and events?"

Apologies to Jerry Della Femina.*
From the World Economic Forum:
  • Rising COVID-19 infection rates pose a threat to global tourism.
  • A new app acts as a health passport for travellers who are virus-free.
  • Using blockchain technology, it provides an encrypted record of test results.
  • Its creators say it could allow healthy travellers to avoid quarantine.
  • The app could also allow sports and entertainment venues to reopen safely, as well as the global conference and exhibition industry.
Thousands of summer holidays are now up in the air, following a series of COVID-19 flare-ups around the world, with trips cancelled and travellers forced to quarantine when they return home.
In mid-July, the number of confirmed cases globally jumped by a million in just four days. The UK imposed a 14-day isolation on holidaymakers returning from Spain after infection rates spiked there, prompting the UK’s biggest tour operator to cancel all holidays to that country.

After recording its first cases since April, Viet Nam closed the tourist hotspot of Da Nang to tourists and evacuated 80,000 tourists from the city.
Now, a new health passport app promises to restore confidence to the travel industry, which has been badly hit by the pandemic. Global tourism shrank by 97% in April, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

A possible solution
CovidPass is the brainchild of one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, Mustapha Mokass. It also involves other YGLs across 5 continents, including Muna AbuSulayman and Peggy Liu. CovidPass uses blockchain technology to store encrypted data from individual blood tests, allowing users to prove that they have tested negative for COVID-19.

Unlike contact tracing apps, CovidPass will not track users’ movements. Non-mandatory contact tracing apps have met with only limited success so far due to privacy concerns....
....MORE

Previously:
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Bring You Davos: The World Economic Forum Is REALLY Pushing Surveillance Cities
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*Mr. Della Femina was a New York advertising guy and the inspiration for Mad Men.
In the 1960's he was brainstorming with some colleagues on how to sell Panasonic televisions and he came up with the tagline "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor".
In 1970 he used the tagline as the title of his book on advertising. Here's the 1971 paperback cover:



The key takeaway from the book is Be Bold (borderline crazy).
Good advice for running a business, not so good for running a portfolio.