Showing Off Your Vaccination Status

New York has been at the forefront of covid since the beginning. It's continuing to do that with its vaccine passport, Excelsior (who named this???) which has seen downloads in the double-digit thousands for all of August.

But it's not the only app that's in demand.

New York now requires proof of vaccination for most indoor activities, from dining to gyms. The app, which holds your vaccine status and is available for anyone who received the jab in the state, is the easy way to show off your status and gain quick entry.

Since launching in May, Excelsior Pass was downloaded roughly 2M times, according to our estimates. That's about 10% of the total population of the state, which is not as high as I expected but also much higher than any other state. But... I suspect most of those downloads are coming from NYC residents, a population of roughly 8.8M, making the share jump to around 25%.

There's another area that requires vaccination, and that's travel. There, the app you'd probably expect to streamline things is actually streamlining things. Clear.

If you travel often enough, you must have seen Clear before. It's the service that lets you jump the line in major airports. It recently added support for showing vaccination status, and its downloads have been climbing.

Our estimates show that over the last few months, downloads of Clear have grown by a factor of five, from an average of 30K per week before the summer to more than 150K in the first week of September.

I always expected (more, hoped) that the unlockdown would mean that covid is behind us and we can get back to normal, but it's nothing like that. Instead, this unlockdown is all about learning to operate with the threat still around us. Politics, opinions, and science and making it so that covid won't be fully gone any time soon. But as a society, we're seeing signs the future is more about evolution than it is about rewinding back to a known time.

A lot has changed in the last year and a half, and more will change in the near future. From how we consume movies, to how we interact with others, and even how we move about IRL. And as I've been saying almost every week now, apps are at the core of this shift.