Lifting Lockdown Constraints
ProACT Sam takes an overview on the practical solutions to lifting lockdown constraints to allow expat travel to resume.
Around the world lockdown constraints are being gradually lifted allowing expats to move around again.
That UK citizens are not allowed to leave the country without good reason is the biggest current constraint for UK Expats. Even if they could travel, there are travel restrictions into many other countries.
The whole world can open up gradually but one thing expats should face up too and accept in return for freedom to travel is a vaccine passport.
PASSPORTS
Passports of a type have been around for over 500 years. For safe passage as ‘Laissez-Passer’ in the early days.
Photographs allowed real identity to be demonstrated in a travel documents with the first Passport photograph introduced by Britain in 1914 at the start of World War One.
Only in 1920 did the compulsory passport we know today become a formal requirement for travel under an international convention.
Coincidentally just after WW1 and the Spanish Flu pandemic.
BIOMETRIC DATA
Biometrics data is very common these days but not new.
Fingerprints, Iris Scans, Facial recognition, voice recognition are all part of biometric data.
Airports and city streets have cameras that can recognise faces in a crowd. National ID cards have Biometric data added that confirms such information to a reader, whether that be a passport scanning machine or a watching camera.
The chips we see on bank cards can also be incorporated into passports and ID cards to verify key biometic data.
NEXT STEP
So after world war C —WWC - Coping With Corona - the covid pandemic, the route to lifting constraints appears a natural next step in the modern development of passport and biometric data - to include vaccine and medical test data into the travel documents expats need to freely travel around the world.
There may well be good ethical, moral, libertarian issues to argue against this, that is not for this article. If you want to travel consider the world we live in.
When you look at your smartphone, they didn’t exist until 2007.
in 2012 they introduced fingerprint recognition - biometrics.
They then started tracking your health data, heartbeat, steps, flights, irregular heart rhythms.
Now facial recognition is the norm.
You can pay with you smartphone, have your travel tickets scanned from your smart phone, GPS location data can track you to within a few square meters on this planet. As you pass security cameras, they can scan your chips in the phone, passport, ID or bank cards.
Biometric medical data could be a valuable asset for people travelling with medical conditions or on routine medicines.
Where a pandemic is concerned we can accelerate the reopening of worldwide travel by including vaccination & test data in our travel documents.
LIFTOFF
Already Covid tests are required to travel across border. If the vaccines do prove to stop the virus spread, then everyone in society benefits by travellers being vaccinated so as not to spread the virus.
The opening up and lifting of constraints to allow us to go outside or across border is most safely done for the majority with biometric vaccine and test data being shared.
It could be on a slip of paper but why not the 21st century way on our portable ID.
Cyprus is one of the first countries to bring such a requirement in. From 1st of May 2021 a new era starts with UK and Russian travellers allowed to freely travel into Cyprus with proof of a double vaccination completed.
In a 100 years time Biometric medical data is likely to be a normal requirement to travel across border. Such are the after affects of the massive social upheavals created from a world at war.
Will June the 10th be a day to celebrate, the end of lockdown constraints, the Queens official Birthday and her husband Prince Phillips 100th Birthday?
Lets hope come midsummer we end this lockdown madness.
Key Dates in Lifting Lockdown Constraints
What a year it’s been with many false starts. We trust lockdown constraints can be lifted once and for all.
Here are some key dates going through to midsummer when maybe this madness will be over:
Subscribe
Like what you’re reading? Subscribe and receive the latest expat news, views and analysis directly to your inbox!
Join our Retainer Service
We offer a retained clients service so that you can retain us to help you in all expat matters across borders. Subscription includes exclusive benefits such as tax registration, a registered address, will reviews, accounting software, exclusive content & Q&A’s.
