The EU Digital Green Certificate is live…in seven countries only (for now)

Remember the European Union’s Digital Green Certificate that I discussed about a month ago?

Well, it’s live…sort of.

Seven countries began using the European Union’s digital certificate on Tuesday (June 1), allowing for fully vaccinated people to travel.

The Digital Green Certificate began operating ahead of schedule this week in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Croatia and Poland. The digital record stores whether a person has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, has recovered from the virus or has tested negative for the virus within 72 hours.

So what does “using” mean? According to the European Union, this is what those seven countries are now doing:

…seven Member States – Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Croatia and Poland – have decided to connect to the gateway and started issuing first EU certificates…

The referenced “gateway” is the EU-wide mechanism that “provides for the verification of the security features contained in the QR codes of all certificates.” As I mentioned previously, EU Digital Green Certificates are not issued by the EU itself, but by entities within member countries such as hospitals and health authorities. Each issuing entity, however, is registered with the EU gateway, to make sure that fake certificates are not issued by “Joe’s Reely Gud ID Service” or whoever.

As the German “Digitales COVID-Zertifikat der EU” web page notes, four of the seven countries (Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Poland) are contiguous, so presumably land travel over these countries’ common borders has been eased by the Digital Green Certificates. I have not been able to confirm this, however; sometimes it takes a few days to work out the kinks.

And, as noted above, the seven countries may not necessarily be verifying ALL types of certificates. Remember that a complete certificate will be capable of registering any of three events. The seven countries may or may not be capable of recording all three of them…yet.

	been vaccinated against COVID-19
	received a negative test result or
	recovered from COVID-19