Vojtěch: “Restaurants May Soon be Obliged to Check People’s Covid Certificates”

Minister of Health Adam Vojtěch (ANO) is considering making pubs and restaurants responsible for actively checking guests’ Covid certificates.

According to him, it will be easier with a mobile application for storing and checking certificates.

At present visitors to pubs and restaurants must have a negative test, certificate of vaccination or post Covid immunity, but they are only obliged to produce it in the event of an inspection.

However, not everyone has welcomed this proposal. Representatives of the food business agreed with the chief hygienist Pavla Svrčinová that for restaurants, might be enough to post a message that only guests meeting the conditions of the Ministry of Health will be served. Thus, the responsibility would not fall on business operators, but on customers.

According to the Minister, more than 280,000 people downloaded the Tecka application for storing the certificate on the first day.

It works either passively to store the issued certificate, or it is actively connected to the database of the Institute of Health Information and Statistics (ÚZIS) and automatically updates itself with the results of a new test or a given vaccine.

The Czech Health Ministry has banned Czechs from travelling to Russia, Tunisia and other countries due to the spread of COVID-19 variants there.

The travel ban took effect on Thursday for Russia and next week for Tunisia. Both countries have recorded surges in new cases in recent days.

The ministry added Russia, Tunisia, Paraguay, and Namibia to a dozen others including India and Brazil where non-essential travel has already been banned.