International airline industry initiates trial of COVID-19 travel pass

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) on Monday started the trial of a travel pass designed for the pandemic era, reported Asia Times.

The IATA initiated a two-week pilot trial of the digital travel pass on Singapore Airlines' Singapore-London route.

The initiative is overdue, for perhaps no global sector has been as hard hit by COVID-19 as air travel.

Last year, international passenger demand was 75.6 per cent below 2019 levels. Asia-Pacific airlines' full-year traffic plunged 80.3 per cent in 2020 compared with 2019, the deepest decline for any region, reported Asia Times.

To re-open borders without quarantine and restart aviation and governments' need to be confident that they are effectively mitigating the risk of importing COVID-19. This means having accurate information on passengers' COVID-19 health status.

Informing passengers on what tests, vaccines and other measures they require prior to travelling, details on where they can get tested and give them the ability to share their tests and vaccination results in a verifiable safe and privacy-protecting manner is the key to giving governments the confidence to open borders.

( With inputs from ANI )