Navigating Vax Passports & Travel Restrictions
You may like them or you may hate them, but vax passports are edging sideways into endurance sport. They may not yet be a prerequisite for racing (they are in rare occasions), but they’re quickly becoming a part of your race experience nevertheless. For example…
I just navigated my way through Hawaii’s travel restrictions, in preparation for my trip to Kona for the IRONMAN. A little early for that, as its early August and the WC isn’t until October. Okay, but have you seen those “Don’t Become Your Parents” commercials? Too late for me! I’m already there!
Anyway, about that, you must go to the State of Hawaii’s Safe Travel’s page. You may not be as early at this as I was, but I wouldn’t put this off to the last minute, if I were you. There are some steps. First, you have to establish a login. Click the “Trips” icon (above is a screenshot from the Hawaii Safe Travels site) and build your trip. This requires you to put into the field the address of the place your staying, and this is a kind of iffy thing because some of the VRBO-type sites don’t give you the address until you’re closer to the travel date.
I’m not here to judge your reason for not getting the COVID vaccine, if that’s you. But the world has erected guardrails to participation (in everything) for the vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. I’m going to write now with a specific message to the unvaxxed vaccine-intentioned rather than confirmed no-COVID-vaxxer: there’s a time component to your decision. The next thing you must do on the Hawaii Safe Travels site is to apply for a “Quarantine Exemption.” Let’s be clear what’s going on here. If you’re not vaxxed, the vaccinated world is getting less patient with you. (Some) employers, universities, countries, states, service providers are tightening the screws. Become vaxxed or face untenable inconveniences, such as weekly COVID testing. States can’t keep you out, constitutionally, but they can make it tough for you to travel there, especially if that travel is by plane. Hawaii requires you to remain in a 14-day quarantine unless you test negative or are vaccinated. Countries can keep you out. The Supreme Court just took a stand on the first vaccine mandate case, in favor of the mandator, and without any apparent dissent. Like it or not, this is where the momentum is.
So, about getting vaccinated: when you set up your Quarantine Exemption, and you use your vaccinated status as the basis for it, you have to place into the fields when you were vaxxed, and even the batch numbers as you see on the screenshot below (which you don’t need to remember, they’re part of the vaccine record you may not even know is archived). Bear in mind that with Pfizer or Moderna your shots are 3 or 4 weeks apart, and you aren’t fully vaxxed until some time after the second shot. So, if you intend to travel to Hawaii the first week of October using your vaxxed status, you’d better prepare to get that first shot very soon if you want Hawaii to honor that exemption you’ve established.
If you think you’ll get to Kona on the basis of a negative COVID test, that’s also getting tougher. Have you tried to get a COVID test recently? It’s not easy to find a test appointment, depending on where you live. Because of the squeeze I wrote about above – with weekly testing required of a lot of unvaccinated workers – and the tests required for travel, it’s harder to get that test on-demand than it was, say, last May. And, you must get that test no earlier than 48 or 72 hours before travel, depending on your destination (which is also a nail-biter, because these PCR tests require 48 hours of process time).
I’m about to travel to a European country, and it’s the same. I’ve got to show proof of vaccination, and a lot of these sites (this country has a site much like Hawaii’s Safe Travels page) are dodgy. This site wouldn’t work for me, and it took me a couple of days retrying it before I realized I have to populate the “apartment number” field in order to get to the next step, even though I have no apartment number in my address.
My theme here is that whether or not your vaccinated, travel is becoming tougher; racing will become tougher; and you shouldn’t put off preparing for travel and racing until the last minute. It’s going to get tougher if you’re not vaxxed and if you think you’re ready for the COVID vax you should not put that off if you’re intending to use this as a basis for school, work, travel, racing, (e.g., if you're a schoolteacher and you've got to get the vaccine, it may be a 5- or 6-week process before you're deemed to be "fully vaccinated").
As for Kona, this was a 95% for certain race a couple of months ago, but my instinct tells me it's dipped at least a little. The race does enjoy an accepted exemption from the maximum number of people allowed in an outdoor gathering. But I note that major Hawaii-based outdoor athletic events, such as the Queen Liliuokalani Long Distance Canoe Race and Duke’s OceanFest, are now off until next year, these 2021 cancellation decisions made just within the past couple of days.
In my discussions with IRONMAN folks, I don’t get the sense that they feel that a vax mandate for Kona participants will tip the scales. It did make a difference in Lake Placid, but apparently not in Kona. The IRONMAN folks are not currently of the view that a vax mandate will ensure a 2021 race, nor will the lack of that mandate harm its chances. But things on the ground are changing fast in Hawaii.
This autumn has been our anticipated great return to racing, with a lot of spring and early summer events postponed until post-Labor Day. But this new COVID wave has placed some events in peril. When we polled this in April, about 7 in 10 of Slowtwitchers were in favor of a vaccine passport. For those in that cohort, getting a vax passport is getting easier. New York has had its Excelsior Pass, and California (my state) brought online its Digital COVID Vaccine Record, which I found easy to use. Once that record populated on my iPhone I took a screenshot of it. You’ll see that screenshot above left.
While more and more states are making digital records (vax passports) easy, there are third-party sites as well, such as CommonPass, that handshake with the State of Hawaii (you can use your CommonPass record to enable your Quarantine Exception), as well as other governments and travel partners, such as jetBlue, United, Lufthanza, Qantas and many others. Note that when you apply for and get a CommonPass passport, it's good only through the trip or dates you indicate; you must refresh it. Note your expiry date.
Above right is my CommonPass record. Either “passport” would work for my upcoming Kona WC trip and, because I have become my parents, I have both "passports" on my phone, to be double-prepared. Finally, not that anyone would use my bar code or data in the screenshots above to game the system (!), but all the batch numbers, data, bar codes I publish here have been altered.
