A lot has been said that this is the “new normal”, but surely, we haven’t reached there yet. I’m hoping that normality is very much not being locked-in at home juggling work-life balance between Teams calls, home-schooling, virtual meetings, remote beers and agreeing which member of the family will be brave enough to venture out for groceries.
We do know that what we have learned from the last 3-4 weeks is that we will be thinking long and hard about the way we do things when we come out the other side of this Covid-19 pandemic. No doubt we will have all experienced that odd shuffle around a supermarket, waiting to pick up some fruit whilst someone else loiters in the same section contemplating whether apples or pears are the right choice and then darting into your space deciding on grapes at the last minute. In short, we have learned to trust no-one. The assumption has successfully been drummed into us, that our innocent fruit picker could well be infected or be a silent assassin walking around a supermarket leaving a trail of Covid destruction behind them; “stay home, save lives”
So, how do we move on from this? How do we start doing the things that we used to do again, but in a way that is now socially acceptable? We must start from the ground up and rebuild trust. Trust is the core tenant required to allow society to start moving back towards an ‘old’ way of working.
This is a moving feast, as new information in the fight against Covid comes to light every day, but we cannot sit back and hope that organisations can just startup again without some level of assurance that employees or customers should be returning to work or considering flying again.
Airlines and Airports are asking the very same question – how they stimulate travel again and help to provide a safe environment, that will give customers peace of mind that it is ok to get back in a plane again.
The team at Coforge have linked up with APPII, an emerging player in the background verification product space, to help play their part in answering that question and are developing a Health Passport App that can be used to help validate the health status of individuals and provide a level of assurance to all of the key players in the travel industry. The app will allow users to self-certify Covid-status in the app and register to link that into the healthcare system to validate the status against the latest information held against them within the NHS. The app is providing more than contact tracing, it is also providing a verification of an individual’s status at that point in time.
If we can restore capacity with teams that have validated their immunity status, we can do our part to start rebuilding trust and laying the foundations for this “new normal”.
