In the end, Catalans won't have to have their digital Covid certificates at the ready when they step into bars and restaurants this weekend. The government has been forced to call a temporary halt to the extended implementation of the Covid passport, due to begin this Friday, due to technical problems: specifically, the overloading of the website and application La Meva Salut, from which the certificate needs to be downloaded. The implementation planned for today, for its mandatory use in order to enter bars, restaurants, gyms and care homes in Catalonia, has been temporarily halted. Although it has been possible to download the certificate through the application since before the summer, large numbers of people have not done so. The Catalan health minister, Josep Maria Argimon, explained that the situation will be reviewed again on Monday to decide when the obligation will be implemented again: "We'll have all the data from the most technological point of view".
Thus, for the next couple of days at least, only the existing use of the Covid passport in Catalonia will apply: it must be shown when entering nightlife venues as well as ballrooms and celebrations in interior spaces where dancing is possible, says the Catalan ministry.
Members of the public began to report problems in accessing La Meva Salut on Thursday afternoon, after the Catalan High Court authorized the government's proposal. Both the website and the La Meva Salut mobile app were jammed by an avalanche of users requests to download the certificate. These problems have continued throughout the day today, which led the government's standing committee to take the decision to postpone the introduction of the new rules.
363,358 people on line
The pressure on the website is reflected in the numbers: this afternoon at 2pm there were exactly 363,358 people queuing for access to the app. This total did not stop rising from the early hours of the morning, and waiting times at midday were longer than an hour. Many users despaired and gave up trying to get their certificate. However, according to the Catalan health department, in the last four days, a total of 707,000 certificates have been downloaded from the application, 314,000 of these in the last 24 hours.
The health authorities apologised to the public for the inconvenience caused and asked people to be patient. Yesterday, they acknowledged that the app was running "slowly" and that work was being done to respond to all access requests. In the end, a system reboot was carried out and by early Friday evening the service had improved and difficulties had eased.
How does it work?
What is the Covid passport? Officially known as the Digital Covid Certificate, it is a standardised document brought across the EU, which proves that the person has been either fully vaccinated against Covid-19, or has recovered from the virus in the last six months, or has given a negative result to a recent Covid test (within the last 72 hours for a PCR test, 48 hours for an Antigen test). The businesses and locations affected by this new measure are working with a website called verificacovid, which is used to scan the QR code of the customer's certificate using a mobile phone or tablet. Its system only checks if the passport is valid or not, without having access to the personal data of the passport holder.