Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Lo­cal se­cu­ri­ty firm El­liot Chin Ex­ec­u­tive Ser­vices (ECES) has de­vel­oped an elec­tron­ic sys­tem that can be used to al­low ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple ef­fort­less en­try in­to Safe Zones with­out hav­ing to car­ry around their im­mu­niza­tion cards.

How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny is seek­ing the Min­istry of Health’s en­dorse­ment and as­sis­tance to make it pos­si­ble. 

Dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion of the sys­tem to the me­dia yes­ter­day, ECES man­ag­ing di­rec­tor El­liot Chin said they have been li­ais­ing with the min­istry to help make it pos­si­ble.

The sys­tem his COV TT team de­signed us­es an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion card the size of a dri­ver’s per­mit which will have a per­son’s vac­ci­na­tion in­for­ma­tion.

This in­cludes the per­son’s name, date of vac­ci­na­tion, the lo­ca­tion of vac­ci­na­tion, the vac­cine’s brand and its batch num­ber. This in­for­ma­tion will al­so be stored on a chip em­bed­ded in the card or a unique QR code.

Uti­liz­ing Ra­dio Da­ta Trans­mis­sion tech­nol­o­gy, Chin ex­plained that es­tab­lish­ments will be able to scan these cards and have a record of the per­son en­ter­ing.

These cards can be scanned by a man­u­al scan­ner via a unique QR code or even wire­less via WiFi or Blue­tooth as soon as the per­son en­ters the space. 

“Once they walk in­to an es­tab­lish­ment our scan­ners will grad­u­al­ly pick it up, mean­ing, that you don’t need to scan it. You don’t need to walk past and scan every time you go in an es­tab­lish­ment,” Chin said.

He said an es­tab­lish­ment us­ing the sys­tem will not be able to view per­son­al in­for­ma­tion such as the pa­tron’s ad­dress or con­tact in­for­ma­tion- on­ly their name, age and vac­ci­na­tion de­tails.

In the fu­ture, he said an NFC tag can be im­ple­ment­ed in­to the sys­tem which can be at­tached to a mo­bile de­vice and re­duce the need for the card. 

How­ev­er, he said the com­pa­ny now needs the Min­istry of Health’s ap­proval to roll out the sys­tem which can be op­er­a­tionalised al­most im­me­di­ate­ly. 

“Right now are ask­ing for full per­mis­sion and full en­dorse­ment. We are not ask­ing for fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance,” he said. 

He pro­pos­es that once the min­istry ap­proves the pro­gramme, they would just need its as­sis­tance to ver­i­fy the vac­ci­na­tion sta­tus of in­di­vid­u­als ap­ply­ing for a pass. 

He said they’ve al­ready be­gun dis­cus­sions with lo­cal busi­ness­es who are in­ter­est­ed in their pro­pos­al but re­quire the min­istry’s en­dorse­ment. 

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, the min­istry said it had not en­dorsed the use of any dig­i­tal sys­tem re­gard­ing proof of vac­ci­na­tion.