Welcome to Travel Well with Allan Wright!
In this week’s episode, Allan discusses vaccinations and activity passports that allow people to travel and do other things such as attend concerts, eat indoors at restaurants, or go to museums. It is exciting to think that we could be back to enjoying our normal activities without social distancing and masks in the very near future.
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Can’t watch the video right now? Here’s the video transcript of Vaccines and Activities:
Hi, this is Allan Wright. Welcome to the Travel Well with Allan video update.
Today, I’d like to talk about the effects of vaccinations on activities and not just travel. So we’ve been talking about vaccine passports for a long time allowing you to get into a country and travel abroad. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that country is going to be open.
For example indoor dining, visiting museums, etc., that would pretty much ruin your vacation for many places like going to Paris. So what’s very important, what’s happening right now in terms of passports for activities
Now I have four examples. The lead example you’ve all heard about is Israel. They have what they call a green passport. It now allows Israelis to go into restaurants, to go use the pool, to go to the gym, to attend sporting and cultural events, even to stay at hotels. All of which are limited or banned for those not vaccinated.
That’s a huge, huge change and it means that countries will be following suit and allowing people to travel in and then do activities along with locals who are also vaccinated and will this happen probably very soon.
On March 17th, which is coming up, the European Commission has a proposal in front of it to do the exact same thing. In fact, they’re even calling it a green pass just like Israel is doing. They are talking about having it available to also those who’ve had negative PCR tests but for tourists where those PCR tests might only be valid for 72 hours, that doesn’t really help us. Essentially that means if you want to be doing that and they open it up to foreigners that you will be requiring a vaccine not only to get into the countries but then to do things there.
Here in the U.S., the CDC doesn’t issue those sort of mandates like they do in Israel but they have recommendations and those are changing. They first finally came out with vaccination recommendations for those vaccinated. For example, you don’t have to quarantine if you’ve been exposed and you can meet together with others who are vaccinated. Obviously, we’re going to be seeing dinner parties – vaccinated dinner parties which is a great thing. People need to socialize.
Here in New York, example four, they’re creating their own Excelsior Pass, it’s called and it was tested at a professional basketball game and a professional hockey game, allowing people to enter if they have been vaccinated. Big deal because New York is saying they’re going to use this to reopen theaters, stadiums, other businesses like that. This means Broadway, for example. Who wants to come to New York if you can’t even do anything here? Locally tourism is not going to be happening in the reverse either until we actually can open up.
So big deal not only are we talking about vaccine passports but we’re talking about vaccine activity passes which will be apps and it will allow you hopefully to go to Europe and to engage in things like indoor dining and museums as soon as, I think, this summer.
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