UK NHS app updated with Apple Wallet support for COVID Pass
Separately from its controversial coronavirus contact tracing project, the U.K. has updated its regular NHS app to effectively become a vaccination passport.
UK COVID Pass in Apple Wallet
Wales and England's famously poor $50 million NHS COVID app is currently under criticism for sending almost 700,000 self-isolation alerts in the week of July 14-21, 2021. Now known locally as the "pingdemic," these alerts have become so numerous that the UK government has cut back on its advice about self-isolating.
According to BBC News, though, the separate NHS app has been given more COVID-related functionality. NHS App is an iOS app that lets users access health services from their phone.
Now it's been updated to allow iPhone and iPad users to store their COVID vaccination details in the Apple Wallet app. In England, vaccinated people get what's called an NHS COVID Pass, and increasingly are being asked to show it as a condition of entry to events or venues.
Businesses are not required to ask for it, but the UK government is encouraging the use wherever people are likely to be in large groups for a sustained period.
Users of the NHS App must register with their National Health Service details, and then from the Popular Services section, choose Get your NHS COVID Pass.
There are different options depending on whether users are travelling, although the government also says the pass is not to be used for international travel at all.
The app generates a QR code, although the UK government calls it a barcode. This code has an expiry date on it, but that date is specifically to do with the QR code, it is not an expiry for the COVID pass.
Once generated, the QR code can be displayed within the NHS App or, now, also sent to Apple Wallet. If it's sent to Wallet, it will not automatically be updated after the expiry date.
Users will have to go back into the NHS App, get a new QR code generated, and send that to Apple Wallet.
Read on AppleInsider
UK COVID Pass in Apple Wallet
Wales and England's famously poor $50 million NHS COVID app is currently under criticism for sending almost 700,000 self-isolation alerts in the week of July 14-21, 2021. Now known locally as the "pingdemic," these alerts have become so numerous that the UK government has cut back on its advice about self-isolating.
According to BBC News, though, the separate NHS app has been given more COVID-related functionality. NHS App is an iOS app that lets users access health services from their phone.
Now it's been updated to allow iPhone and iPad users to store their COVID vaccination details in the Apple Wallet app. In England, vaccinated people get what's called an NHS COVID Pass, and increasingly are being asked to show it as a condition of entry to events or venues.
Businesses are not required to ask for it, but the UK government is encouraging the use wherever people are likely to be in large groups for a sustained period.
Users of the NHS App must register with their National Health Service details, and then from the Popular Services section, choose Get your NHS COVID Pass.
There are different options depending on whether users are travelling, although the government also says the pass is not to be used for international travel at all.
The app generates a QR code, although the UK government calls it a barcode. This code has an expiry date on it, but that date is specifically to do with the QR code, it is not an expiry for the COVID pass.
Once generated, the QR code can be displayed within the NHS App or, now, also sent to Apple Wallet. If it's sent to Wallet, it will not automatically be updated after the expiry date.
Users will have to go back into the NHS App, get a new QR code generated, and send that to Apple Wallet.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
This is just ugliness at a big level, utterly without a modicum of thought of next week or next year. Incredible.. So you're equivocating a 'what's my name' identification with 'what is my health and medicine' identification? Are you kidding me?
You all are creating quite a nice future -- cloaked in 'we are doing it to protect you'. That not one single poster above my message even mentions the ramifications is appalling.
Trust me when I say to others reading this thread, you don't want these people 'keeping you safe for your own good'. You or your children will have neither safe nor good with people who can't see and think past today's TV or newspaper headlines.
People are just incredibly funny. Sometimes they even let thst funniness be allowed to be seen or heard by many.
Unfortunately those who think they know it all when in reality they are ignorant, they are a large and loud crowd. The ultimate victim ends up being better decision making as a collective..
• Mentioning two unrelated apps
• Wrongly claiming the government has cut back on advice to self-isolate. The facts are that daily self-testing is allowed as an alternative to self-isolation for some workers in key sectors, and from August 16th nobody who is double-vaccinated will need to self-isolate.
• Some businesses are beginning to as for the Corvid-Pass as from September it will become mandatory for people entering crowded venues that have the potential to become super-spreading events, such as nightclubs, concerts, etc.
• The track and trace app is not “famously poor”, it’s one of the most successful globally in terms of usage and the number of lives it has been projected to have saved. Shame the USA couldn’t come up with one…
(Though with Apple’s plans to add ID cards and passports to the wallets, it’ll happen eventually.)
Contact tracing in the US is essentially non-existent, and we have no contact tracing app at the federal level or in my state.
As for an official COVID passport: I want an electronic as well as a hard plastic official COVID passport, one with oval hang holes on the top and bottom so it can be placed in an ID hanger and have a hologram or some device which would make it practically impossible to forge.
I live in the Chicagoland area and there's a festival going on called Lollapalooza which requires vaccine cards, a vaccine record, or a negative COVID 19 test. Reports have it that idiots are forging vaccine cards, so you can bet that this will turn into a super-spreader event.
When I go somewhere for services, I want to see which service representatives are vaccinated and which are not - so I can see the vaccination status of any workers from whom I accept services. Given a choice, you can bet I'll use the vaccinated representative even if I have to wait. Shops or restaurants requiring a vaccine password would be my first choice.
I also want checkboxes on things like grocery delivery with a "Vaccinated only" so I can choose who can deliver things to my door, and when I place a service call which requires someone to come into my home I want the ability to only have the vaccinated come in to my domicile. Businesses seeing statistics on these requests would eventually figure out that they should require employees be vaccinated.
Given that the new Delta variant spreads like chicken pox and can infect the vaccinated, you can bet I want to reduce the chance that I'll run into an asymptomatic infection by only dealing face to face with the vaccinated.
This is no joke: my wife and I are older and have co-morbidities - we're fully vaccinated, but we want to reduce the possibility of severe consequences as much as we possibly can.
Before I retired I worked for a major midwest medical center. During my tenure, I was required to have a flu vaccine even though I was in IT and never met with patients in the clinical setting. COVID is many times more serious, and with variants popping up like dandelions vaccination and herd immunity are really our only way out.