Abstract
The year 2020 has witnessed the emergence of coronavirus disease
(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 its 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 frauds related to
COVID-19 vaccination certification, anti-body testing, and medical
supplies. Blockchain technology can assist to combat the COVID-19
pandemic by assuring safe and reliable medical supplies, accurate
identification of virus hot spots, and establishing data provenance to
verify the genuine personal protective equipment that is decentralized,
trustworthy, traceable, and transparent. In this paper, we discuss the
potential blockchain applications for the COVID-19 pandemic. We present
the high-level design of three blockchain-based systems to enable the
governments and medical professionals to efficiently handle health
emergencies caused by COVID-19. We discuss the important ongoing
blockchain-based research projects to demonstrate the adoption of
blockchain technology for the COVID-19. Finally, we identify and discuss
future research challenges along with their key causes and guidelines.