Denmark will become one of the first countries in the world to create a “corona passport” to allow vaccinated residents to travel overseas.
People who have received a Covid vaccine will be given access to download a certificate from a government website to prove they have been inoculated.
Authorities also plan to introduce a “digital corona passport” within three to four months, particularly for business travel.
Danish Finance Minister Morten Boedskov said the immunity passports would encourage international travel.
“It is absolutely crucial for us to be able to restart Danish society so that companies can get back on track. Many Danish companies are global companies with the whole world as a market,” he said.
“It will be the extra passport that you will be able to have on your mobile phone that documents that you have been vaccinated. We can be among the first in the world to have it and can show it to the rest of the world.”
The country has dealt the coronavirus pandemic fairly well compared with the rest of Europe, recording nearly 200,000 cases and 2,170 deaths since March 2020.
On Wednesday, however, Denmark reported a sharp rise in people infected with the UK strain of the virus. A total of 1,116 infections of the variant first identified in England have been registered since mid-November, the State Serum Institute said.
In the fourth week of January, 16.5 per cent of all positive tests analysed for their genetic material had the mutated variant, up from 13.3 per cent the previous week and 4 per cent in the first week of the year. However, the general infection rate is on the decline in Denmark.
As border closures remain in place to keep out the new variant, the European Commission has been considering vaccination certificate plans to help get travellers to holiday destinations and avoid another disastrous summer for tourism.
However, the EU's executive arm said such certificates would only be used for medical purposes for now.
The Danish government said it would decide at a later date whether the digital passport should be used for purposes other than travel.
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