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\begin{document}

\title{Blockchain and COVID-19 Pandemic: Applications and Challenges}



\author[1]{Raja Wasim Ahmad }%
\author[1]{Khaled Salah }%
\author[1]{Raja Jayaraman }%
\author[2,2]{Ibrar Yaqoob }%
\author[1]{Samer Ellahham }%
\author[1]{Mohammed Omar }%
\affil[1]{Affiliation not available}%
\affil[2]{Khalifa University of Science and Technology}%


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  \date{June 14, 2024}


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\begin{abstract}
The year 2020 has witnessed the emergence of coronavirus (COVID-19) that
has rapidly spread and adversely affected the global economy, health,
and human lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of
existing healthcare systems regarding their inadequacy to timely and
efficiently handle public health emergencies. A large portion of today's
healthcare systems are centralized and fall short in providing necessary
information security and privacy, data immutability, transparency, and
traceability features to detect fraud related to COVID-19 vaccination
certification, and anti-body testing. Blockchain technology can assist
in combating the COVID-19 pandemic by ensuring safe and reliable medical
supplies, accurate identification of virus hot spots, and establishing
data provenance to verify the genuineness of personal protective
equipment. This paper discusses the potential blockchain applications
for the COVID-19 pandemic. It presents the high-level design of three
blockchain-based systems to enable governments and medical professionals
to efficiently handle health emergencies caused by COVID-19. It
discusses the important ongoing blockchain-based research projects, use
cases, and case studies to demonstrate the adoption of blockchain
technology for COVID-19. Finally, it identifies and discusses future
research challenges, along with their key causes and guidelines.%
\end{abstract}%



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