In the United Kingdom, Health Secretary Matt Hancock says that the government is looking into issuing "immunity certificates" to COVID-19 patients who have recovered from the illness. Such certificates, he told The Telegraph, would "enable people who have had the disease, have got the antibodies and therefore have immunity" to "get back as much as possible to normal life."
Germany is also considering such a scheme, according to The Guardian. German researchers are preparing a mass study that aims to find out the extent of the pandemic by initially testing 100,000 volunteers for coronavirus antibodies. The testing would be extended to a growing sample of the population over time.
An immunity passport scheme could be piggybacked onto the testing campaign. "Those who are immune could be issued with a kind of vaccination pass that would for example allow them to exempted from restrictions on their activity," Gerard Krause, head of epidemiology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, told The Guardian.
