As many had feared, the English Premier League has restarted without fans in the stands. While some pre-season test events have taken place to trial run what it would be like hosting a limited capacity, there is a strong and urgent focus on bringing back a full house of fans. To help expedite this, a consortium of British companies has delivered an end-to-end Covid testing and technology solution to the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson that claims to enable the safe return of fans to sports stadia to full capacity without the need for social distancing.
Led by Manchester based cyber technology VST Enterprises (VSTE) it presented a Fans Are Back plan to Downing Street and the DCMS Select Committee, along with sports management and rights holder Redstrike, public health and event safety management company Halo and occupational health and testing provider Latus Health.
The plan involves the use of 10-minute rapid Covid test kits, a secure digital health passport that will authorize a person’s identity and their Covid-19 test status. A built in ‘contact tracing app’ that uses anonymized data to detect ‘positive’ infection contacts within sports venues also forms part of the technology offering.
The ultra secure contact tracing app – which has been in development for the last 5 months – is part of the digital health passport that Manchester based tech company VST Enterprises Ltd (VSTE) has built inside its existing VHealth Passport infrastructure. The health passport which is test agnostic – allows it to work with all rapid tests and PCR based lab testing. It also uses the most secure and advanced cyber technology coding VCode which means that all personal information and data is ultra secure and cannot be hacked. Most importantly the contact tracing app does not divulge a persons identity or information and uses anonymized data. The VCode technology is currently being used by the United Nations as part of their SDG collaboratory program to give nine billion people unique identifier codes by 2030.
The combined VHealth Passport and contact tracing technology is available and ready to deploy now with a substantial supply chain in excess of 50 million rapid Covid-19 test kits which can be used to get sports fans back into stadia.
The contact part of the ‘track and trace’ is completely anonymized which means a person’s privacy and personal information is not shared and their location is not tracked in real time, other than their ‘check in’ to a sports stadium, music venue or theater.
“A regime of rapid testing alongside existing PCR based tests is the only way we can progress forward and was in tune with how the Prime Minister outlined the Government’s plan for mass testing. This is vital not just for the British economy but our entire way of life. Concert venues, sports stadiums, theatres cannot survive much longer without an end to end solution, that is safe and secure from a testing perspective, public health and security and protection of data,” said Louis-James Davis, CEO of VSTE.
