LINCOLN, R.I. (AP) — Rhode Island is developing a cellphone app that will allow residents to quickly and easily prove they have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, Gov. Daniel McKee said Wednesday.
Although hesitant to call it a vaccine passport, the Democratic governor said at a news conference at a Lincoln elementary school that the app is a “convenience item to anybody in the state of Rhode Island that wants to use it, whether it’s in their travels or wherever they might want to show that they’ve been vaccinated.”
The governor’s office said the program is voluntary.
Tom McCarthy, executive director of the state Department of Health’s COVID-19 response effort, said the app is still in the testing phase and should be available for wider rollout later this month.
He said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paper cards that people are given when they get vaccinated are inconvenient to carry around and easy to lose.
The app, called 401 Health, will be compatible with programs in other states and programs used for international travel, McCarthy said. The number 401 is the state’s telephone area code.
State health Director Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott said that while the omicron variant of the coronavirus has not yet been detected in Rhode Island, the state is prepared for its arrival.
The health department testing laboratories “already have the genomic surveillance system in place to detect this omicron variant if it establishes a presence here in Rhode Island,” she said.
She reiterated that vaccination continues to be critical as the number of new cases, the positivity rate and the hospital admissions rate in the state are all on the rise.
She urged parents to get their eligible children vaccinated, noting that between Halloween and Thanksgiving the positive case rate has doubled in 5- to 9-year-olds, and tripled in 10- to 13-year-olds.
“There are roughly 200,000 children in Rhode Island, and most of them have not been vaccinated,” she said.
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