Could Jeju Safety Code be a reason why the popular resort island of Jeju has so few COVID-19 cases?
A citizen reporter for Korean-language news website OhMyNews seems to think so.
During a recent five-day trip to Jeju to visit sites related to the Jeju Uprising and walk the Olle trails, the island never had more than 20 new COVID-19 cases.
On one day, it had just three.
This is almost unbelievable considering there are 180 flights a day connecting the island and Seoul, the world’s busiest air route. It’s also the only route in the world with over 10 million passengers a year.
The writer first points to how keenly Jeju islanders put quarantine guidelines into practice, especially how thoroughly they check your vaccination status before letting you into restaurants, cafes and even outdoor sites.
Indeed, the most common greeting the writer heard was, “Please show me your smartphone.”
Having just returned from eight days on the island, I can confirm this as more or less true — I was asked to see my vaccination status far more than I can recall ever being asked to see it in Seoul.
The OhMyNews writer also said the very first thing people have to do when they arrive in Jeju is install the contact tracing app “Jeju Safety Code,” noting that without it, traveling in Jeju is virtually impossible.
He praised the app as being much more convenient than the tracing apps used on the mainland, which typically make users display QR codes issued by “internet chat programs and portal sites” (i.e., Kakao and Naver) to scanning devices set up at each business.
With Jeju Safety Code, all you do is open the app, scan a QR sticker at the business and boom, you’re done.
Every time you scan a QR code, Jeju Safety Code leaves a record on your phone. Though this made the writer feel a bit spied on at first, he said all Jeju islanders have expressed “endless faith” that because their data is encrypted using blockchain technology, personal information like their visit record and vaccination data cannot be leaked.
The OhMyNews piece essentially confirmed what I wrote here during my trip to Jeju. Jeju Safety Code — jointly designed by ICONLOOP and Jeju’s provincial government — is incredibly easy to use, probably more secure… and practically everywhere. Every hotel, restaurant, cafe, bar, museum and park on the island uses it. When you enter a place, the first thing you do is look for a Jeju Safety Code QR, just as a matter of habit.
A few places have scanners for Kakao or Naver for the benefit of visiting mainlanders, but unless you’ve got Jeju Safety Code, you’re going to spend a lot of time writing down your contact information by hand. Or not get in.
As I said in my post at the time:
“We’ve been talking about “blockchain’s coming killer app” for as long as I’ve been writing at the Iconist. Well, if an ubiquitous contact tracing app in one of Northeast Asia’s most popular tourist destinations doesn’t qualify, it’s gotta come pretty close.”
