Bulgaria: More than 2M Covid certificates downloaded, state IT firm says

The total number of Covid certificates downloaded through the National Health Information System has exceeded two million, Bulgaria’s Ministry of Transport and Information Technology said on October 30.

The ministry said that in the past 10 days alone, when amended measures were introduced, users had downloaded a total of more than 1.05 million documents, which is 52 per cent of the total number of certificates.

The certificate generation system was put into operation on June 1 2021. On October 25, 2021, nearly 263 000 downloads were reported during the day, which is a record for this time, the statement said. On the same day, the system reported another record – nearly 27 000 downloads in 60 minutes.

At peak hours, users downloaded an average of 500 documents per minute, which is nearly nine certificates a second.

The statement quoted Ivailo Filipov, executive director of state-owned IT company Informatsionno Obsluzhvane, as saying that more than 30 per cent of Bulgarian citizens now had certificates which enabled them to enter public places where restrictive measures had been imposed.

Transport Minister Hristo Alexiev said that close to 50 000 of those employed at schools and kindergartens had the document.

The statement said that so far, the system had generated a total of 3.563 million certificates. Of these, about 1.5 million were documents certifying a completed vaccination cycle, and nearly 17 000 were documents showing that the person had received a booster dose.

Nearly 1.3 million certified a negative coronavirus test result, and more than 178 000 were for Covid-19 patients, confirmed with a positive PCR result. More than 60 000 certificates confirmed a positive result of an antigen test.

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