India reviews CoWin vaccine certificates amid UK travel row

People who have taken both doses of Covid-19 vaccines and want to travel abroad will have a CoWin vaccination certificate with their full date of birth, as per Dr RS Sharma, the CEO of the National Health Authority (NHA) India.

The date will follow the Year-Month-Day format, and it will be as per World Health Organization (WHO) standards for international travellers. Dr Sharma said, "As the world is slowly opening up for business and travel, we are working continuously to ensure that international travellers can travel stress-free. This new feature and the date of birth format will be in "yyyy-mm-dd" format as per the WHO standards for international travellers."

He said that everyone travelling abroad could update their vaccination certificates on CoWin by entering their date of birth as per their passports and downloading the certificates again.

"Currently, we collected only the year of birth which is reflected as the age of a person in the certificate," added Dr Sharma.

The United Kingdom, on September 22, issued its new travel guidelines to include an Indian-made version of the AstraZeneca vaccine in its updated list of approved COVID-19 vaccines. The recognition of Covishield has come after strong criticism over UK's initial refusal to recognize the vaccine.

(ANI)