Welcome to our dystopian infernal landscape, where you may soon have to throw away your Apple wallet as you try to enter an airport to prove you’ve been given covid-19 vaccine.
According to a recent The Bloomberg report, this is the reality facing residents of Los Angeles, where a recent partnership between Apple and the Healthvana health app could soon mean that vaccination records will be offered digitally, in an attempt to (hopefully) stimulate people to actually inoculate. Because the virus that causes covid-19 requires a dose of two photos, logic goes, recording the first digitally stored photo could help ensure that people are promptly deleted. for the second shot – and, finally, it could serve as proof that a person trying to access a grocery store or a concert venue has been vaccinated.
Los Angeles recently broke its own record for both covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations, leaving health officials to fight to establish a vaccine payment plan “as soon as humanly possible.” , said Claire Jarashow, director of the vaccine and preventable disease control at the county department. public health.
While vaccines will be officially tracked in registries and patients will be given paper tracking cards, Jarashow said health officials have also seen a benefit in giving patients access to their records. digital, which will have benefit of being harder to lose.
“We are really worried. We really want people to come back for the second dose, “Jarashow told Bloomberg. “We just don’t have the capacity to make hundreds of medical records to find the first doses of people and when to take the second.”
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Although some patients will probably be careful to turn to the protected doctor data for some , Healthvana CEO Ramin Bastani, claims that the company stores its data on Amazon Web Services’ HIPAA-compatible servers, making the application “as secure as we can make it,” according to Jarashow.
“Personally, I would feel comfortable using it, so I hope it is reassuring,” she added..
According to Bloomberg, Healthvana is also in talks with concert venues in Los Angeles County, employers and schools about the application of this technology –“Everyone has a large number of people who interact with them,” says Bastani, although he adds that is skeptical that the app will become the de facto way to identify your vaccination status.
“It will not be like a single credit card that you can use in the US,” Bastani said say. “Sometimes you can pay in cash, other times you can use the Apple Wallet.”