A few weeks ago, the Government introduced the CovidCheck app, to be able to easily verify the validity of CovidCheck certificates, also known as EU Digital COVID certificates (EU DCC).
Those certificates contain all the required information about the COVID status of a person (vaccinated, tested or recovered).

Citizens have the possibility to carry their certificate in paper form or in digital form, for example as a PDF on their mobile device.

But for some members of our Open Data community, the most convenient way to store such an information on an iPhone or an Apple Watch was to use the Apple Wallet app!

After a few days of hacking, they published a new tool named EU Digital COVID Certificate to Passbook.

This tool just does what its name implies, with it you can scan the QR-Code of your certificate and store it into your Apple Wallet. On Android, you can use an App compatible with the Wallet format (.pkpass file).

How did they do this?

Technically, a QR-code is limited in the amount of data it can contain. For such a complex information as a COVID certificate, it cannot contain the whole data. The vaccine, with its name and all its characteristics, is not directly stored in the QR-Code, which only contains a reference to this vaccine.

To be able to fully read the COVID Certificate, some reference data about tests and vaccines was needed. Luckily, this data was freely available and the Europe eHealth Network published it under an open source licence. You can find it in this dataset:
Europe eHealth Network Digital Covid Certificate Payload

Thanks to this dataset, the developers were able to reuse it and develop this tool.

For more information about the development of this tool, you can read the description of this reuse.