The Utility, Feasibility, Security, and Ethics of Verifiable COVID-19 Credentials for International Travel: Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop on August 3-5, 2021 to explore effective, feasible, and secure ways to document and provide health information for safe international travel in a way that is ethical and does not exacerbate inequities. Experts considered the use of COVID-19 travel credentials, denoting the traveler’s vaccination, testing, and/or recovery status. This Proceedings of a Workshop-in Brief provides a high-level summary of the discussion on possibilities for employing COVID-19 travel credentials, including how to overcome practical and ethical challenges and their potential role in preventing the spread of disease. Sections include: Public health and epidemiology, Policy development, Accurate, secure, verifiable, and usable data, Case studies and current examples (panel), Privacy issues and legal considerations, Ethical considerations, and Business and economic issues.

Recommended reporting items for epidemic forecasting and prediction research: The EPIFORGE 2020 guidelines.

BACKGROUND: The importance of infectious disease epidemic forecasting and prediction research is underscored by decades of communicable disease outbreaks, including COVID-19. Unlike other fields of medical research, such as clinical trials and systematic reviews, no reporting guidelines exist for reporting epidemic forecasting and prediction research despite their utility. We therefore developed the EPIFORGE checklist, a guideline for standardized reporting of epidemic forecasting research. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We developed this checklist using a best-practice process for development of reporting guidelines, involving a Delphi process and broad consultation with an international panel of infectious disease modelers and model end users. The objectives of these guidelines are to improve the consistency, reproducibility, comparability, and quality of epidemic forecasting reporting. The guidelines are not designed to advise scientists on how to perform epidemic forecasting and prediction research, but rather to serve as a standard for reporting critical methodological details of such studies. CONCLUSIONS: These guidelines have been submitted to the EQUATOR network, in addition to hosting by other dedicated webpages to facilitate feedback and journal endorsement.