More than 800,000 booster recipients are waiting to get their updated EU Digital Covid Certificate (DCC).
As reported in the Irish Examiner, although 2.5 million people have received their booster dose, just 1.7 million updated DCCs have been issued.
There are now concerns that that thousands of Irish people could be prevented from travelling abroad if they do not receive their updated cert by February 1st.
This comes as new EU rules are due to come into effect whereby Covid certs will become invalid from this date for foreign travel if a person's primary vaccination doses were more than nine months previous.
The issuing of updated certs began earlier this month in what the Department of Health has described as “a phased basis”.
According to a spokesperson for the department, “all subsequent certificates will be issued in a Business-As-Usual capacity — automatically issued via email within 24 to 48 hours of receiving the booster dose”.
Commenting on the delay many people are facing, the spokesperson said “there were a large number of people for which a certificate was generated, but there was no email associated with their information”.
“To prompt these people to request their certificate, over 700k texts have been issued by the HSE over the past week to notify these people that their new certificate is ready and can be requested.”
“Those who have received a booster vaccine from a GP or Pharmacy may experience a time lag between receiving the dose and when the data is uploaded to the HSE system so as to issue the updated certificate”.
There are some instances whereby people who received their booster jab before Christmas have still not been issued an updated cert.
“In some limited cases, there may be a delay in a person's record being updated to account for the additional dose and a new certificate may not be ready yet,” a spokesperson stated.
“In these cases, if someone requests an updated certificate via the portal, the most recent certificate will be issued to them which may be their original certificate.”
