Re-starting the global economy requires a new level of global coordination and personal privacy protection

As a member of the US Trustee Council of The Common Project, I am focused on carrying on the work that the Dossia Consortium began in its 10-year journey for the deployment of comprehensive, individually-controlled, portable personal health records. The Commons Project has specifically zeroed in on the challenge of giving individuals health records that enables them to travel more freely between countries and states by providing data that assures public health officials in the destination countries and states that travelers will not spread a highly infectious virus after arrival.

As of this writing, at least 93 percent of the global population live in a country with travel restrictions related to the coronavirus, and 3 billion people reside in countries enforcing complete border closures to foreigners. The pandemic continues to have an enormous impact on the global economy, with world trade expected to fall by between 13% and 32% in 2020—not to mention the painful burden of lost jobs and people separated across borders from loved ones.

COVID-19 has highlighted our short-fallings as a global community in preparing to contend with widespread disruptions that have painful, and possibly long-term, consequences. People understandably struggle with broad orders from governments that keep businesses closed, prevent travel across borders, isolate us from loved ones in distant places, keep schools closed and even interfere with vital healthcare operations. This protocol is not only poorly matched to Covid-19, but it also needs to be refined to be usable for future infectious disease pandemics.

Cross-border movement restrictions are particularly problematic when essential workers, such as healthcare professionals or utility workers, are crossing a state or country border from one locality to help care for populations that have particular vulnerability to a pandemic or, as we have seen many times, to the effects of extreme weather events.

We’ve seen a handful of examples where countries or regions have implemented smart, targeted solutions.When the six nations of the East African Community opened to essential trade in June, COVID-19 testing created kilometers of back up trucks along the borders as truck drivers waited for hours to get test results. By working together to share test results in a harmonized system, border crossing and regional integration was later accelerated within East Africa.

We need this kind of coordination and harmonization of cross-border travel on a global scale and within large countries with independent units of government. Instead, we have a patchwork of short-term, stop-gap policies that range from travelers wearing a GPS tag for a full 14-day quarantine, to unreliable temperature screening before boarding a plane or on arrival as well as regional entry agreements or full travel bans for people coming from some areas but not others.

For economic activity and travel to resume fully, we need border crossing experiences that are safe, predictable and do not require excess disclosure of personal health information. Today, these policies are not universally in place.

While our healthcare system is working at breakneck speed to develop vaccines and treatments, in parallel, our global community must work together in a coordinated and responsible way to deploy technologies and processes that support safe resumption of trade and travel. 

We have to stop acting as individual countries or states and focus together on building solutions that adhere to three key principles:

1)   Standardization: We need to implement a consistent framework used across nations and states where travelers can apply a secure and verifiable way to document their health status as they travel across borders

2)   Flexibility: Countries and states will also need the flexibility to update their health screening entry requirements as the pandemic evolves and as science around testing and immunization matures.

3)   Privacy: Travelers need to be able to present their COVID-19 status in a way that protects their data privacy. Governments are heavily constrained in handling sensitive information, but individuals can consent to having trusted third party private or non-profit organizations provide authorizations that do not require detailed personal information to be shared with government officials anywhere in the world.

This model would enable people around the world and within the United States to use a common platform to present and verify their COVID-19 status at every point in their journey—from booking, to customs, to aircraft boarding, ground transportation and even lodging check-in— while keeping other personal health information private and secure.

The Commons Project is working with a broad coalition of public and private partners around the world to develop and launch a standard global model grounded in those three key principles. Developing and scaling a model will not be without its challenges. 

A new level of cross-industry cooperation among the health, aviation, travel and tourism sectors will be crucial. COVID-19 has understandably raised a great deal of uncertainty, confusion and fear. But this once-in-a-generation pandemic has highlighted the world’s capacity to innovate and collaborate to find shared solutions. 

Not only can this approach help restore our economies to the pre-COVID-19 era, it can serve as a model for solving the future global health challenges undoubtedly to come.

We cannot afford to act alone.