I'm happy with my Covid passport, thanks

To follow-up on a previous post, Covid passports are now being actually used across Europe. I've been checked a few times in restaurants in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Each time, I felt considerably more comfortable about being in a crowded space knowing that everyone around me had some substantial level of immunological protection. 

So I continue to think this is a very good idea. As was blindingly obvious, checking the passes is not some unbearable burden the hospitality industry would have you believe - it is no burden at all. It takes all of five seconds to check a pass, and virtually every pub, restaurant, nightclub or any public venue involves a much longer interaction with the staff than that anyway. 

Likewise, having seen objections from the industry that "it's not for restaurant owners to ask about the health of their customers", I just think that in the case of a highly contagious and dangerous disease, this is irresponsible lunacy. I mean, so you'd be willing to let someone in and spread the virus around, would you ? Why in the hell would you want to do that ? I'm baffled. Maybe you think that knowing in advance that someone has the disease, i.e. quarantining them once already known is different from not knowing their status ahead of time (innocent until proven guilty and all that), but this is almost literally playing Russian roulette. Knowing that the virus is running rampant, and having easy and affordable access to testing and/or vaccination, it doesn't make any sense to me that you'd rather just take the risk instead.

This is a bit different to the regular case of knowing that any customer might be a potential murderer, which no-one goes around checking pre-emptively. For starters, the number of people actually prepared to murder complete strangers in cold blood is many orders of magnitude smaller than the number with Covid, so the risk/benefit calculation is quite different. Moreover, murders don't propagate exponentially. They don't threaten the entire health system of an entire country. There are legitimate grounds of presuming everyone to be, in a sense, guilty rather than innocent in the case of a highly contagious diseases that they can't directly control - your personal character isn't being criticised, it's just taking a precaution much as you would take similar safety measures against hurricanes or landslides.

Finally, the objection that they somehow threaten personal liberty is pure fantasy - of the kind that J. R. R. Tolkein would have spat on. Covid passports don't contain anything except your immunological status. They are not some mysterious back door into a draconian society in which only government-approved cronies would be allowed to participate, because that idea just doesn't make any sense.

Fortunately this is having the desired effect : vaccination uptake is finally increasing here. Which frankly shows what a bunch of selfish idiots people tend to be. Tell them they should get vaccinated because it will help stop other people dying and they're all whingy about "rights" and "personal liberty" and other made-up excuses - and they are excuses  - but tell them they need it to go to the pub and they're literally queuing down the street.

Likewise, the health sector. The news routinely reports on how people being laid off because they won't get the damn vaccine is going to cause staff shortages, but what they never ask is why these people are even in the health sector at all. I mean, why would you - excepting the small number of medical exemptions - work with vulnerable people you're ostensibly trying to save and not take the five minutes needed to get vaccinated ? Do you actually want to murder them ? I genuinely don't get it.

The Atlantic has a nice overview of Europe's strategies. Generally this seems to be proceeding much as you might expect : people are content to follow the rules, they just won't go out of their way to go any further. The fraction of people yelling about how Covid passports are evil who actually aren't prepared to put up with them is very, very small, because the whole objection is based on nothing whatever of any substance. There is a hardcore of genuine lunatics and misguided ideologues, encompassed by various sorts of hangers-on, people who are generally angry anyway, who tribally associate themselves with others but don't actually believe in the cause... just as the leader of Insulate Britain doesn't want to get his home insulated or some "anti-vaxxers" have indeed been vaccinated. See, the age-old and genuinely important question "lives or liberty" doesn't really apply when your loss of liberty is so minimal as to be essentially fictitious. 

People tend to be armchair bigots and heroes alike. They are happy to rant and rave, and some of them even believe in what they're saying. But the number who are prepared to go much more than waving a placard around is remarkably small. And, sat at home writing a blog, I certainly don't count myself an exception to this by any means.

Some countries are going further than I originally stipulated. The Czech Republic is now saying that you need a vaccine and isn't accepting a negative test as an alternative (with exceptions). Austria is going as far as compulsory vaccination. This is going several steps beyond a mere Covid passport - we now have true vaccine passports and even more. And... I think I'm okay with this.

True, as the Atlantic notes, this may drive polarisation - but my suspicion is that this is true largely or only of the hardcore, who are damn hard to reason with anyway. There isn't much of a rational counter-argument that anyone can come up with against people who would prefer to go to the pub than save their granny. Yes, these people have an important right to protest, but that doesn't mean we have to listen to anything they say. So if harsher measures increase vaccination among the reluctant and/or lazy, and only cause a backfire among a miniscule fraction, that seems all to the good to me. Moreover, we'd had compulsory vaccination for nigh-on 200 years, and it does work. As noted last time, what is required by law is perceived as necessary, whereas what isn't is seen as an optional extra. It is not - if done properly - that people simply cow in fear of the law as Tory ideology dictates. The BBC has a very nice, very detailed piece explaining this. 

This leaves the important question : why aren't passports having more of a direct effect ? In the Czech Republic, they haven't been used much for very long, but in Wales they have - yet case numbers there remain high. My guess is that they don't cover as many holes in the Swiss Cheese model as needed, due to a combination of lack of enforcement and lack of requirements as to where they're required (which Wales has taken steps to address). And of course, they don't stop private gatherings of any kind, nor can they be required for access to essential services. 

Does that matter ? Yes and no. Clearly they are not a silver bullet. If not properly used they can give a false sense of security, just as it's folly to think of vaccines as the only layer of protection needed. We should still be enforcing social distancing, mask wearing, and using home office wherever possible even with vaccine mandates. 

So, we have to temper our expectations of what passports can do. They can't give us total normality back - vaccine and test efficacy isn't high enough for that, and not even the most diehard enthusiast would insist on them being required absolutely everywhere. But they can help in reducing the outbreak while allowing some aspects of ordinary life back. Surely, that makes them worth having.