Replies

22 June: BBC: Will travel be safer by 2022?
By Lina Zeldovich
It’s 2022 and you’ve just arrived at the travel destination of your dreams. As you get off the plane, a robot greets you with a red laser beam that remotely takes your temperature. You’re still half asleep after a long transoceanic flight, so your brain barely registers the robot’s complacent beep. You had just passed similar checks when boarding the plane hours ago so you have nothing to worry about and can just stroll to the next health checkpoint.

As you join the respiratory inspection queue, a worker hands you a small breathalyser capsule with a tiny chip inside. Conceptually, the test is similar to those measuring drivers’ alcohol levels, but this one detects the coronavirus particles in people’s breath, spotting the asymptomatic carriers who aren’t sick but can infect others. By now you know the drill, so you diligently cough into the capsule and drop it into the machine resembling a massive microwave. You wait for about 30 seconds and the machine lights up green, chiming softly. You may now proceed to immigration, so you fumble for your passport and walk on...

Of course the best thing to put everyone’s worries to rest would be a vaccine...

Travellers would present the customs officers with an entrance visa and a vaccination record. That could be a paper card – or a tiny tattoo on their arm, invisible to the naked eye but readable by an infrared scanner. This technology already exists and has been tried on live animals and human cadaver skin, said researcher Ana Jaklenec at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their method uses micro-needle patches that can deliver both the vaccine and a squirt of an invisible ink under the person’s skin, storing the vaccination record.
“The macro-needles don’t leave scars and are less invasive than the regular needles – it’s like putting on a Band-Aid,” Jaklenec said. That subdermal record is readable by a simple scanner, she added. “It can even be done with a modified phone.”

Supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the technology was aimed to help in the developing world where paper or electronic records aren’t always reliable...
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200621-will-travel-be-safer-by-2022