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"Many people said they felt like they themselves had become the pathogen, and it hurt them to feel other people avoiding them even after they had recovered."

"If someone gets infected by sharing a meal with a patient, then sharing the meal is the actionable information here," he says. "That the two people are brother- and sister-in-law is not important." All people need to know, he argues, is that they were in the same place at the same time as an infected person. The rest does not matter. The fear is that what are supposed to be neutral data points about infected persons becomes speculation about motives and morals. Patients can then be blamed for getting or spreading a disease and shunned by society, says Kim Myoung-hee with the Seoul-based nonprofit People's Health Institute."

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South Korea's use of personal data to trace coronavirus infections has inadvertently led to the stigmatization of some patients.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

South Korea's approach to the coronavirus has been widely praised. It relies on widespread testing and information to trace the routes of infection. A drawback to that approach is the social stigma that patients often face. As NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Seoul, that shame can be worse than the infection.

ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Every COVID-19 patient in South Korea is assigned a number. Patient No. 15, for example, traveled from Wuhan, China, in January. Soon after that, he tested positive for the virus. While under self-quarantine, he shared a meal with his sister-in-law, who also became infected. Speculation erupted on Korean social media that the two were having an extramarital affair. Privacy advocate Oh Byoung-il finds this troubling.

OH BYOUNG-IL: (Speaking Korean).

KUHN: "We're concerned," he says, "about whether the amount of personal information that's currently being disclosed is enough or too much."

We know about patient 15 because South Korean health authorities legally use cellphone data, credit card histories and surveillance cameras to trace infection routes. The government posts data, including patients' age, gender, nationality and occupation, online and sends it to residents via cellphone alerts. Residents who think that they may have been near an infected person are supposed to self-isolate or get tested for COVID-19. Oh Byoung-il's civic group, the Korean Progressive Network, has called on the government to release less personal information.

OH: (Speaking Korean).

KUHN: "If someone gets infected by sharing a meal with a patient, then sharing the meal is the actionable information here," he says. "That the two people are brother- and sister-in-law is not important." All people need to know, he argues, is that they were in the same place at the same time as an infected person. The rest does not matter. The fear is that what are supposed to be neutral data points about infected persons becomes speculation about motives and morals. Patients can then be blamed for getting or spreading a disease and shunned by society, says Kim Myoung-hee with the Seoul-based nonprofit People's Health Institute.

KIM MYOUNG-HEE: (Through interpreter) Many people said they felt like they themselves had become the pathogen, and it hurt them to feel other people avoiding them even after they had recovered.

KUHN: Kim adds that sending out information on infected persons is part of the government's attempt to be transparent. Stigmatization is an unintended side effect.

M KIM: (Through interpreter) If criticism becomes too much, people will avoid getting tested. And when infected people go into hiding, controlling the outbreak will be much harder.

KUHN: She says that stigmatization often takes the form of discrimination towards minorities such as the Joseonjok, ethnic Koreans from China. Kim Sook-ja is a Joseonjok entrepreneur who runs restaurants serving Chinese cuisine in Seoul. She says locals have unfairly associated her eatery with the virus.

KIM SOOK-JA: (Speaking Korean).

KUHN: "I heard people on the street," she says, "saying out loud, oh, this is a Chinese restaurant, so we better avoid it." Kim says in her defense that she hasn't been in China in years and she's really just the same as other Koreans.

Paik Jong-woo with the Korean Neuropsychiatric Association offers counseling to COVID-19 patients. He argues that South Koreans have cooperated with government measures to combat the virus without the use of lockdowns.

PAIK JONG-WOO: (Speaking Korean).

KUHN: "Even though Korean society is industrialized," he says, "we still consider interpersonal relationships more important than individuals, so we try to avoid actions that harm others." The downside, he says, is that anyone seemed to be out of line with the majority can be stigmatized.

Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Seoul.

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South Korea's Tracking Of COVID-19 Patients Raises Privacy Concerns

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South Korea's use of personal data to trace coronavirus infections has inadvertently led to the stigmatization of some patients. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: South Korea's approach to the coronavirus has been widely praised. It relies on widespread testing and information to trace the routes of infection.

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The South Korean student seemed just fine when she returned to Seoul from school in Boston earlier this month. No cough, no fever. Immigration authorities warned her to stay home and self-quarantine for two weeks. But she was upset that coronavirus had forced her family to cancel a vacation in Hawaii so her mother took her to the southern Korean island of Jeju as consolation.

On Day 1 of their Jeju vacation, the student started feeling ill. After returning home to Seoul, both she and her mother tested positive for COVID-19. Investigators immediately swooped in to recreate every step of their travels, scouring surveillance footage, cellphone records, and credit card statements. Twenty Jeju businesses shut down as a precaution, and more than 90 people went into self-quarantine.

Angered by their defiance of the self-quarantine order, the governor of Jeju said he would sue the student for more than 132 million South Korean won ($100,000) in damages. It is a case that has sparked debate, with some petitioning in support of punishment and others questioning whether the public vilification in the name of national good is a violation of privacy.

South Korea has been lauded for flattening the curve of COVID-19 with its lightning fast, coordinated response - rightly so - but its methods have also raised questions about whether the government is going too far with technology and surveillance in the name of the public good.

As I laid out in a piece for Prospect magazine, South Korea's success so far in flattening the curve is not just a matter of luck or a difference in culture. It's about planning and preparation. South Korea's strategy was to test quickly and widely in order to track and stop the path of the contagion, and to institute strict guidelines on social distancing and self-quarantine.

One key element of that strategy was to coordinate access to information.

In the wake of a deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2015, South Korea revised its Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act to require the government to "promptly disclose information" that could prevent the spread of infectious diseases, such as "the movement paths, transportation means, medical treatment institutions, and contacts of patients of the infectious diseases."

For our intern Hazel Lee, who returned to Seoul late last month, that meant getting her temperature checked upon arriving at the airport. After confirming that she had no symptoms of COVID-19, she was instructed to download the government's self-quarantine app, which requires her to log in twice a day for two weeks and to enable the GPS on her phone so the app can monitor her movements.

Since then, South Korea has taken stricter measures at the border by testing all international arrivals for COVID-19, shuttling them from the airport to the Olympic Stadium in Seoul. On the first day of the new regulations, eight foreigners were denied entry after refusing to self-quarantine for two weeks at a government facility.

If Hazel falls ill, she can call a hotline, check online, or let any of South Korea's popular mapping sites locate one of the country's 600-plus pop-up, mobile, and drive-thru clinics nationwide to get a COVID-19 test. Results come back by text within hours.

Meanwhile, local authorities leave care packages on the doorsteps of residents in self-quarantine. Jihan Kim, another Wilson Center intern, shared a photo of the self-quarantine kit sent by his local district office two days after his arrival: masks, sterilizer and antiseptic, a thermometer, a hazmat disposal container. Also in his kit: enough food to tide him over for two weeks, including a 12-pack of microwaveable rice, soup, seaweed - and Spam, a legacy from the Korean War. The crowning glory: a box of high-end ginseng, prized for its medicinal qualities.

For a friend whose test came back positive, intern Matthew Kim says officials in hazmat gear arrived to accompany her to the hospital. The next day, a cleaning crew swept through the home to disinfect it. The rest of the family was ordered to self-quarantine for two weeks or face a fine of $2,500.

Meanwhile, investigators jumped in to retrace her steps, checking mobile phone records, credit card charges, and CCTV footage in order to reach out to every person she may have exposed.

Details about confirmed cases are uploaded to a national database that is available online. Local authorities push out texts to area residents to alert them of an infection in their neighborhood and refer them to local social media chats for more details about the person's age, gender, and travel history.

It's a remarkable use of technology and an impressive example of coordination and communication among federal, regional and local agencies, as well as between the public and private sectors. The careful planning and quick action allowed South Korea to move rapidly to produce test kits to diagnose COVID-19 as well as develop apps and websites to disseminate information at a moment when time is of the essence. It has allowed South Korea to gain control over the outbreak without completely shutting down the country - or its economy.

But the pandemic plan comes with a price: South Korea's residents have given up a certain measure of privacy as part of the national campaign to control the outbreak.

Hazel must log into the government app every morning and evening; if she forgets, a reminder is sent by text. If she still doesn't respond, a health official will show up on her doorstep. And if she strays too far from home, a GPS alert will prompt local authorities to reminder her to return to self-quarantine.

Like the mother-daughter who vacationed on Jeju, not everyone has complied with the self-quarantine orders. In the latest development, authorities reportedly are considering electronic wristbands to track those required to remain in self-quarantine.

When it comes to national emergencies, it would be no problem for me to sacrifice my privacy if the measures ensure our safety

I asked JeongHyeon Oh, one of our South Korean junior scholars, whether he was willing to give up privacy in favor of the national good.

"When it comes to national emergencies, it would be no problem for me to sacrifice my privacy if the measures ensure our safety," he wrote.

JeongHyeon noted that Article 37 of South Korea's Constitution grants the government the authority to restrict citizens' rights and freedom "when necessary for national security, the maintenance of law and order or for public welfare."

"In my opinion, COVID-19 is spreading quickly, and the disclosure of patient information is indispensable. The information not only lets people avoid the area of the outbreak, but also encourages people who were there to be examined quickly," he wrote. "That's why the government needs patients' information, and to me this is worth sacrificing privacy."

Whether that approach can be replicated in the West, where medical privacy is so prized and protected, is a question that the United States, Britain, and other democracies need to confront as they consider how to contain and control their outbreaks without trampling on individual rights. In the United States, such sweeping surveillance would likely require federal legislation.

If the public feels as though they are being misled or misinformed, their willingness to make sacrifices - in this case social distancing - is reduced.

The guiding principle during this crisis should be sharing more rather than less, says I. Glenn Cohen, a bioethics professor at Harvard Law School.

"Public health depends a lot on public trust," he told the New York Times. "If the public feels as though they are being misled or misinformed, their willingness to make sacrifices - in this case social distancing - is reduced."

"That's a strong argument for sharing as much information as you can," he said.

Indeed, in South Korea, the government's coordinated plan of action may have engendered public trust in the government.

"Of course, there might be some concerns, but I do not believe the government will become authoritarian. I still believe in the system of the government," said JeongHyeon, our South Korean scholar. "By prioritizing the national good, everyone will benefit."
Jean H. Lee is director of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy at the Wilson Center and a former AP bureau chief in Seoul and Pyongyang. Reach out to her on Twitter and Instagram @newsjean. Do Kyung Ryuk, JeongHyeon Oh, Hazel Lee, Jihan Kim, and Matthew Kim contributed to this blogpost. The views expressed are the author's alone, and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government or the Wilson Center. Copyright 2020, Asia Program. All rights reserved.

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Using tech to fight the virus: How much privacy are South Koreans relinquishing in the battle against COVID-19?

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The South Korean student seemed just fine when she returned to Seoul from school in Boston earlier this month. No cough, no fever. Immigration authorities warned her to stay home and self-quarantine for two weeks. But she was upset that coronavirus had forced her family to cancel a vacation in Hawaii so her mother took her to the southern Korean island of Jeju as consolation.

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For about three weeks from late February to early March, the nation of South Korea was locked in the grips of a tight battle with the spread of the respiratory illness COVID-19, brought about by the ongoing Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic. While a strong state response has since brought the epidemic under some measure of control in the country, the methods used by the South Korean government have nevertheless ignited a new debate around where public health concerns and patient privacy should be met.

South Korea in the thralls of a COVID-19 outbreak

New public health concerns around the COVID-19 outbreak began to unfold in the third week of February. South Korea had just become the second nation after China to witness a steady rise in the number of victims of the new infectious disease, with the country witnessing its first confirmed coronavirus case as early as 20 January. However, it wasn't until almost a month had passed that there were any signs of an outbreak.

On 19 February, the number of recorded COVID-19 cases began to steadily rise. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Korea, the cases seemed to cluster in the city of Daegu. By 21 February, the number of confirmed cases countrywide sat at 346 people and showed no sign of relenting.

The South Korean government subsequently began to undertake swift and decisive action in order to curb the spread of disease and quell the growing public health concerns-methods which many saw as going too far by intruding on patient privacy.

When public health concerns are placed above all else

In response to the growing outbreak, the South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare began making personal information about coronavirus patients public as early as Feb 18 in a move which sparked concerned around patient privacy.

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While they refrained from publishing the names of the patients and other personally implicatable information (such as addresses and contact details) directly, South Korean public health officials did however provide explicit location details about the patients' movements.

These included the specific details about places that the patients had visited, as well as their place of origin.

The information was published on the website of South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, where it was updated dozens of times every day. The Ministry also made the information available via push notifications for smartphone.

According to a report by the BBC, published on 5 March, one such mobile notification read:

"A 43-year-old man, resident of Nowon district, tested positive for coronavirus. He was at his work in Mapo district attending a sexual harassment class. He contracted the virus from the instructor of the class."

According to many members of the public, the actions of the authorities clearly constituted a violation of patient privacy in order to address public health concerns.

How was the information used?

South Korean authorities made use of the information to identify, locate and provide coronavirus tests to hundreds of people who had crossed paths with the COVID-19 patients and their family members-effectively using this method as a basis to conduct more tests and to quarantine and treat new patients where necessary.

According to reports, the government succeeded in back tracing the movements of coronavirus patients using a combination of interviews, credit card statements and CCTV footage.

While the method itself proved to be indisputably successful (South Korea has since drastically reduced the number of new cases), it has however been viewed as controversial due to the fact the information was made public.

South Korea's debate about patient privacy

The South Korean government's tactics are a far cry from the manner in which they have dealt with viral outbreaks in the past, when measures were taken to protect patient privacy.

In 2015, for example, South Korea saw an outbreak in the number of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) infections across the country. While the disease was quickly brought under control, the government at the time faced criticism for the way in which it had withheld information from the public relating to which hospitals were being used to treat MERS patients.

In 2020 however, in the case of the coronavirus outbreak, it would seem as though the South Korean government had chosen to make a complete reversal of these measures.

Regarding the public health concerns brought about by COVID-19, it is noteworthy that many of the cases were reported in connection with the Shincheonji Church-a megachurch whose members were purportedly responsible for spreading the disease further and causing major public health concerns in the Daegu region. The controversy centered around the church's leader, who refused to receive testing on the grounds of protecting patient privacy in light of the government's actions.

The incident highlights the importance of finding a balance between public health concerns and protecting the personal data of patients. While South Korea's response to its COVID-19 epidemic has indeed been successful-it has nevertheless come at the expense of data protection and patient privacy.

South Korean authorities use patients' location data to identify people who had crossed paths with them for testing. #privacy #respectdata Click to Tweet

At present, much of the world are now facing the same coronavirus-related public health concerns. The contrast between the reactions of South Korea and the United States (where patient privacy is better guaranteed) to the COVID-19 pandemic will, in time, provide clues as to the way in which these two crucial forces ought to be balanced in the future.

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Patient Privacy vs Public Health Concerns: A COVID-19 Case Study - CPO Magazine

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For about three weeks from late February to early March, the nation of South Korea was locked in the grips of a tight battle with the spread of the respiratory illness COVID-19, brought about by the ongoing Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic.

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On 9 January 2020, the Korean National Assembly passed amendments (collectively, the 'Amendments') to three major data privacy laws: the Personal Information Protection Act ('PIPA'), the Act on the Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection ('Network Act') and the Act on the Use and Protection of Credit Information ('Credit Information Act').

The Amendments largely aim to:

minimise the burden of redundant regulatory activities and confusion among regulated persons stemming from previously overlapping data privacy regulations and multiple supervisory bodies; and

develop a 'data economy' by introducing the concept of 'pseudonymised data' and a legal basis upon which data may be utilised more flexibly (to an extent reasonably related to the original purpose of collection).

The Amendments will become effective six months from promulgation by the President, except for certain provisions in the Credit Information Act, which will come into effect one to one and a half years after its promulgation (as further specified in the President Decree relating to it).

Please see below for a summary of key changes introduced by the Amendments. Specifics of the Amendments are yet to be finalised as the Enforcement Decrees and related official notices by governing bodies are not available at the time of writing.

Key Changes: PIPA

Clarified concept of 'personal data':

Distinguished concepts of personal data, pseudonymised data and anonymised data (excluded anonymised data from the scope of personal data).

Defined permissible scope of pseudonymised data processing:

Permitted processing of pseudonymised data for statistical, scientific research, or public interest record-keeping purposes.

Permitted combination of pseudonymised data of personal data controllers through specialised agencies.

Imposed restrictions upon pseudonymised data processing.

Permitted use and release of personal data without obtaining data subjects' consent to an extent reasonably related to the original purpose of data collection.

Elevated and strengthened the Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC)'s status and powers.

Added special provisions related to the deleted provisions of the previous Network Act.

Effective date: six months after promulgation.

Network Act

Deleted provisions related to the protection of personal data under the previous Network Act (i.e. PIPA will govern matters related to protection of personal data).

Provided an explicit legal basis for delegating part of the authority of the Korean Communications Commission (KCC) to the Korean Communications Office.

Effective date: six months after promulgation.

Credit Information Act

Clarified the legal basis for analysing and using big data in the finance sector.

Streamlined legal framework by addressing provisions that duplicate or are similar to those under the PIPA.

Improved regulatory framework for the credit information industry.

Introduced MyData Industry (providing consolidated-basis personal information verification and credit information and/or asset management, and establishing the processes through which the integrity of personal information may be secured in connection with it).

Strengthened the protection of personal data in the finance sector.

Effective date: six months after promulgation, provided that certain provisions will become effective on a different date as further specified in the Enforcement Decree.

Implications
Reasonable use of 'Personal Data' without obtaining consent
Under the amended PIPA (Paragraph (3) of Article 15 and Paragraph (4) of Article 17), a personal data controller will be permitted to use and release personal data without obtaining the consent of the data subject in the manner prescribed by Presidential Decree: 'within a scope that is reasonably related to the original purpose of collection' and 'after considering whether the data subject's rights would be infringed upon and/or measures to secure the integrity of the personal information have been properly taken.'

Although we await the Enforcement Decree to guide us on the interpretation of the phrase 'within a scope that is reasonably related to the original purpose of collection,' an official notice issued by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety on 9 January 2020 mentions that matters such as the 'circumstances under which personal data were collected,' 'level of sensitivity of the personal data at stake,' 'potential impact which may be imposed upon the data subjects' and 'whether proper safeguard measures are in place' should be considered when determining whether the proposed use satisfies this 'reasonableness' test.

The Ministry's position appears to be similar to that in Recital 50 of the European Union's GDPR, which provides that:

'[t]he processing of personal data for purposes other than those for which the personal data were initially collected should be allowed only where the processing is compatible with the purposes for which the personal data were initially collected.'

Recital 50 of the GDPR stipulates that one should take into account, inter alia, 'the context in which the personal data have been collected,' 'the reasonable expectations of data subjects [...] as to their further use,' 'the nature of the personal data,' 'the consequences of the intended further processing for data subjects,' and 'the existence of appropriate safeguards in [... the] intended further processing operations' in order to ascertain whether a purpose of further processing is compatible with the original purpose of collection.

Accordingly, we anticipate that organisations will probably need to establish justifiable grounds for use of personal information without obtaining the data subject's consent by evaluating the 'reasonable relevance' of personal data that they intend to use and maintaining and preserving relevant records.
Facilitation of EU market access by responding to GDPR
Korea is yet to receive the adequacy decision from the European Commission because of its finding of a lack of independence on the part of PDPC, which has been the body with the authority to enforce and oversee personal data protection matters in Korea. Since the Amendments have transferred from other bodies certain authorities to the PDPC as previously mentioned, it is hopeful that Korea will be able to receive an adequacy decision from the European Commission.

Assuming that an adequacy decision will soon be received, we anticipate that Korean companies' entry into the EU market may be facilitated, as transfer of personal data from EU member states to Korea will become easier. Companies will need to verify in advance whether they are subject to the GDPR and, if so, ensure compliance with the legal requirements set out under the GDPR to reduce legal risk.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

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korea introduces major amendments to data privacy laws

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Korea Introduces Major Amendments To Data Privacy Laws - Privacy - South Korea

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On 9 January 2020, the Korean National Assembly passed amendments (collectively, the 'Amendments') to three major data privacy laws: the Personal Information Protection Act ('PIPA'), the Act on the Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection ('Network Act') and the Act on the Use and Protection of Credit Information ('Credit Information Act').

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"But as the outbreak drags on and the messages continue to buzz on phones around the country in unison, people are showing signs of fatigue."

"Some South Koreans - who have been receiving these messages on a daily basis for weeks - are starting to see the alerts as a nuisance."

"Information published online and sent to phone users can name specific bars, restaurants or hotels. So, even though patients' names are kept anonymous, a detailed timeline of their whereabouts combined with a person's area of residence may reveal who they are."

""In South Korea, people have been tracked to the point where they could be identified. Their implementation arguably compromised their citizens' privacy and this is a question we have to think about and challenge in a democracy," Sharman said."

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Seoul, South Korea - South Korea has earned international plaudits for tracking and containing the coronavirus since reporting its first case back in February.

Once the largest outbreak outside of China, South Korea has now managed to push the number of cases confirmed each day to around 50.

More:

Swift action and free or affordable mass-testing have been the country's most effective weapons in countering the virus. But South Korea has also turned to technology for help.

Routes taken by infected patients are published online regularly, while incoming travellers are required to report their symptoms daily on an app that they have to download on arrival at the airport.

Moreover, any person with a smartphone in South Korea - almost the entire population, given that nine out of 10 South Koreans have one - gets location-based emergency messages that alert them when they are near a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19.

People get the messages automatically and are not allowed to opt out.

"I've been getting these messages maybe six, seven or even 10 times a day," Cho TW, a university student, told Al Jazeera.

"Now, I know which areas to avoid and I do feel like the government is doing a good job at keeping me informed."

Signs of fatigue

But as the outbreak drags on and the messages continue to buzz on phones around the country in unison, people are showing signs of fatigue.

Raj Sharman, a professor at the University of Buffalo's Management Science and Systems Department, studies the relationship between disaster mitigation and technology. According to his research, the effectiveness of text message alerts depends on the type of emergency at hand.

"When it comes to emergency notifications, how people comply really varies by the context. The impact of the messaging is actually based on one's perception of the threat," Sharman said.

"We tend to look at all disasters as the same but a small storm is very different from an active shooter situation, which is very different from a building fire."

In other words, how people respond to text messages with government advice reflects not only their personal beliefs but societal and cultural pressures.

"Text messages definitely would be effective at least in getting people to know about the situation, but the next question is compliance. If someone thinks COVID-19 is not life-threatening, they may not be as compliant [to health recommendations] as others," Wencui Han, an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Also, if the people around me don't care, then maybe I don't think I have to follow [recommendations]. But if we all, for example, are staying at home and taking these messages seriously, then this influences everyone else."

Steady stream of alerts

At least 10,384 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in South Korea as of April 8, but more than half have already been cured. At least 200 people have died of the disease.

The text alerts are sent out at the discretion of regional governments and specifically target people in those areas, giving them an opportunity to avoid locations where active cases have been found.

The government overseeing Jongno-gu - a district in Seoul with a population of nearly 158,000 - compiles an anonymous list of patients on their website. The site includes their area of residence and where they are currently hospitalised, along with where they have been and at what time.

As one text message alert from the Jongno-gu government reads: "A 15th foreigner in Jongno-gu staying at the Somerset Palace Hotel in Seoul has tested positive. For more information, such as their path of movement, please visit our website."

Sharman says it is hard to judge how effective such text messages are but his studies have found alerts related to slow-developing disasters tend to generate less interest and compliance.

In addition, each individual's perception of the risk from COVID-19 would also affect their behaviour and the impact of the message.

Becoming a nuisance

Some South Koreans - who have been receiving these messages on a daily basis for weeks - are starting to see the alerts as a nuisance.

Lee Yeon-ha, a university student majoring in film and media arts, says the messages have become "very annoying."

"I cannot disagree with the fact that it's good for people to know if there are infected people visiting the same places that they might go to," he said. "But I think the government is sending these messages too frequently ... I know I stopped reading them."

Lee may not be the only one suffering from alert fatigue.

"There are studies that suggest that, if you use text messages for cases of non-emergency, they do lose effectiveness. Also, if they send too many messages, people tend to ignore them," Sharman said. "This happens even in a healthcare context."

In a study of emergency messages on university campuses, Han and her colleagues found that "if you send alerts very often, students will start to ignore this channel. But if alerts are sent rarely, then it's seen as very critical and they will understand that."

Will other countries follow?

Other governments have also turned to technology to battle the virus - using apps to monitor people in quarantine or send reminders on lockdown rules.

But privacy issues are already being raised and even in South Korea some have expressed concerns over the government's data-sharing strategy, since specific details about an infected person's path could ultimately reveal their identity.

Information published online and sent to phone users can name specific bars, restaurants or hotels. So, even though patients' names are kept anonymous, a detailed timeline of their whereabouts combined with a person's area of residence may reveal who they are.

"In South Korea, people have been tracked to the point where they could be identified. Their implementation arguably compromised their citizens' privacy and this is a question we have to think about and challenge in a democracy," Sharman said.

Privacy concerns

Sharman said that some local privacy laws in the western countries such as the US might prevent sending out the equivalent of South Korea's emergency alerts but the greater issue to overcome would be cultural expectations around privacy.

"When governments start using location-based technologies - identifying your location and tracking you - that would be a new experience to Americans. We have always preached against government oversight," he said.

"But in collectivistic societies like India, China and South Korea, the desire for greater privacy is a lower threshold than what we have in Western countries, especially when there is an argument for greater public good."

"In general, emergency messages are very, very rare in the United States," Han added.

However, South Korea was not always so forthcoming with patients' information.

During the 2015 MERS outbreak, Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon criticised the national government, accusing it of failing to monitor suspected MERS patients and withholding information from the public.

That is a far cry from the situation now. As Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-Wha put it in a recent interview with the BBC, the country's new approach "is openness, transparency and fully keeping the public informed."

For Lee, the university student, privacy is merely a necessary trade-off given how easily the virus spreads.

"I am concerned about the privacy of infected people, but I think we should all understand the government's decision," he said. "If I got the virus, I would provide my details to the government without hesitating."

For now, it is unclear whether other countries such as the US - which reported its first case at the same time as South Korea but now has the most COVID-19 cases in the world - will consider a similar alert system.

But the technological infrastructure is certainly there, and Sharman believes it can be implemented in a way that does not compromise privacy.

"I don't know if what South Korea did was right. It's something I wouldn't like. But then again, I am from the US," Sharman said.
Mitch S Shin contributed to this report

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S Korea's smartphone apps tracking coronavirus won't stop buzzing

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Seoul, South Korea - South Korea has earned international plaudits for tracking and containing the coronavirus since reporting its first case back in February. Once the largest outbreak outside of China, South Korea has now managed to push the number of cases confirmed each day to around 50.

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South Korea has been widely praised for its management of the outbreak and spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19. The focus has largely been on South Korea's enormous virus testing programme.

What hasn't been so widely reported is the country's heavy use of surveillance technology, notably CCTV and the tracking of bank card and mobile phone usage, to identify who to test in the first place. And this is an important lesson for more liberal countries that might be less tolerant of such privacy invading measures but are hoping to emulate South Korea's success.

While Taiwan and Singapore have excelled in containing the coronavirus, South Korea and China arguably provide the best models for stopping outbreaks when large numbers of people have been infected. China quarantined confirmed and potential patients, and restricted citizens' movements as well as international travel. But South Korea accomplished a similar level of control and a low fatality rate ( currently 1%) without resorting to such authoritarian measures. This certainly looks like the standard for liberal democratic nations.

The most conspicuous part of the South Korean strategy is simple enough: test, test and test some more. The country has learned from the 2015 outbreak of MERS and reorganised its disease control system. It has a good, large-capacity healthcare system and a sophisticated biotech industry that can produce test kits quickly.

These factors enable the country to carry out 15,000 tests per day, making it second only to China in absolute numbers and third in the world for per person testing. But because COVID-19 is a mild disease for most people, only a small fraction of patients tend to contact health authorities for testing based on their symptoms or known contact with infected people. Many patients with mild symptoms, especially younger ones, don't realise they are ill and infecting others.

If these patients can't be found, testing capacity doesn't mean much. This is where smart city infrastructure comes in. The aim is to work out where known patients have been and test anyone who might have come into contact with them. There are three main ways people are tracked.

First, credit and debit cards. South Korea has the highest proportion of cashless transactions in the world. By tracking transactions, it's possible to draw a card user's movements on the map.

Alex Plavevski/EPA

Second, mobile phones can be used for the same purpose. In 2019, South Korea had one of the world's highest phone ownership rates (there are more phones than people). Phone locations are automatically recorded with complete accuracy because devices are connected to between one and three transceivers at any time. And there are approximately 860,000 4G and 5G transceivers densely covering the whole country.

Crucially, phone companies require all customers to provide their real names and national registry numbers. This means it's possible to track nearly everyone by following the location of their phones.

Finally, CCTV cameras also enable authorities to identify people who have been in contact with COVID-19 patients. In 2014, South Korean cities had over 8 million CCTV cameras, or one camera per 6.3 people. In 2010, everyone was captured an average of 83.1 times per day and every nine seconds while travelling. These figures are likely to be much higher today. Considering the physical size of the country, it is safe to say South Korea has one of the highest densities of surveillance technology in the world.

Using the data

The combination of these three technologies means two things. First, health authorities can find out who an infected person has had close contact with after infection. There are dead spots without CCTV or mobile phone signal in public buildings, but not that many. Nearly all potential patients can be found and tested this way.

Second, a new patient's movement can be compared against those of earlier patients using geographic information systems. That comparison reveals exactly where, when and from whom the new patient was infected. If they can't be connected to a known earlier patient, that means unknown patients exist, and they can then be identified using the method outlined above. The number of unknown patients at any time serves as an indicator of whether the virus is still spreading and more cases will occur in coming days, or whether the situation has been brought under control.

The result of the tracking is not only used by health authorities but also made public via national and local government websites, free smartphone apps that show the locations of infections, and text message updates about new local cases. This help citizens avoid hotspots of infections.

In many ways, this is an overexposure of private information about people's movements. But it is actually an effective way for the authorities to gain public trust, which in turn is important in preventing people from panicking. You could argue this was successful because South Korea is one of the few countries where the COVID-19 outbreak hasn't caused panic buying in supermarkets.

However, there's a big issue for other countries considering similar measures. The level of surveillance and exposure of personal information involved is unlikely to be easily accepted by most other liberal democratic societies.

The difference between the South Korean approach and that of European countries doesn't represent the simple cliché of eastern collectivism versus western individualism. In fact, information exposure can prevent the need for a lockdown of individuals' movements.

In this way, governments around the world are facing a hard choice between these two violations of individual rights (information exposure and movement restriction). South Korea has chosen the former, but France and Italy had to choose the latter. The former requires the necessary infrastructure and a culture that tolerates a certain level of surveillance, neither of which can be created overnight.

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Coronavirus: South Korea's success in controlling disease is due to its acceptance of surveillance

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South Korea has been widely praised for its management of the outbreak and spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19. The focus has largely been on South Korea's enormous virus testing programme. What hasn't been so widely reported is the country's heavy use of surveillance technology, notably CCTV and the tracking of bank card and mobile phone usage, to identify who to test in the first place.

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For the past month, South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19. Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people's movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it's useful to make those data public. Some say it could even be harmful.

The first cases in the country were reported in late January, and then surged a few weeks later. As case numbers grew, authorities launched a massive contact-tracing and testing regime to identify and then isolate infected people, even setting up drive-through testing centres. So far, the country has tested more people per capita than any country in the world - a total of nearly 300,000 people. As of 17 March, the country had reported 8,413 cases.

When a person tests positive, their city or district might send out an alert to people living nearby about their movements before being diagnosed. A typical alert can contain the infected person's age and gender, and a detailed log of their movements down to the minute - in some cases traced using closed-circuit television and credit-card transactions, with the time and names of businesses they visited. In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet and whether or not they wore a mask. Even overnight stays at 'love motels' have been noted.

Other countries, including Singapore, have released data such as the age or gender of people with COVID-19, but nothing as detailed as in South Korea.

Public trust

The South Korean government says the public is more likely to trust it if it releases transparent and accurate information about the virus, including travel histories of confirmed patients. Laws passed since the country's last major disease outbreak, of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2015, now specifically allow authorities to publish this information.

Numerous websites and smartphone apps have also sprung up to collect and map the data, such as coronamap.site. Checking the maps has become part of daily life for many South Koreans.

Experts and the World Health Organization say that South Korea's extensive tracing, testing and isolation measures - along with campaigns encouraging people to avoid large gatherings - have helped to reduce the virus's spread. Over the past two weeks, the number of new cases being reported each day in South Korea has dropped dramatically, from a peak of 909 cases announced on 29 February to 74 on 16 March.

But the specificity of the publicly available data has raised privacy concerns. The data trails released about some of the infected people have been so detailed that they could be identifiable, say some researchers and human-rights activists.

It might be useful for epidemiologists to "privately and securely have this information on hand, especially for contact tracing", says Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts. But she says she's not sure that publicizing such information is worth the risk of exposing people to the social stigma that might come if their community knows they are infected. The potential for stigma could even dissuade some infected people from coming forward to get tested, says Majumder.

Human-rights concerns

On 9 March, Choi Young-ae, chair of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, also expressed concern that the "excessive disclosure of private information" could cause people with symptoms to avoid testing.

In response, South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on 14 March that such detailed location information should be released only when epidemiological investigations could not otherwise identify all the people with whom an infected person had been in contact before their diagnosis.

The idea is that a person with mild symptoms can check the travel logs to see whether they might have come in contact with an infected person, which could help medical officials decide who should be screened, says Sung-il Cho, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University. He thinks authorities are justified in making location information public for this purpose.

But he says an unintended consequence has been that people are avoiding places that an infected person has visited, even though the places have been closed and cleaned since then.

Personal hygiene and social distancing are more important than looking up websites to avoid places that infected people have visited, says Oh Myoung-don, an infectious-disease physician at Seoul National University.

Legacy of infection

South Korea's data transparency during this outbreak has its origins in how the government handled the 2015 outbreak of MERS, which reportedly infected 186 people in South Korea and killed 36. The government at the time initially refused to identify the hospitals in which infected people were being treated, but a software programmer made a map of cases based on crowdsourced reports and anonymous tips from hospital staff. Eventually, the government relented and named the affected hospitals.

The public broadly supports the government publishing individuals' movement, says Youngkee Ju, a researcher in health journalism at Hallym University in Chuncheon. In 1,000-person surveys that he co-authored, published in February and earlier this month, most respondents supported the government sharing travel details of people with COVID-19. Furthermore, most "preferred the public good to individual rights", says Ju. He and his colleagues intend to perform a follow-up survey to find out exactly how much personal information the public supports disclosing.

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South Korea is reporting intimate details of COVID-19 cases: has it helped?

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For the past month, South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19. Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people's movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it's useful to make those data public.

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‘More scary than coronavirus’: South Korea’s health alerts expose private lives

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‘Safety guidance texts’ sent by the authorities contain an avalanche of personal information and are fuelling social stigma

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"South Korean authorities began posting detailed location histories on each person who tested positive for the coronavirus. The site has included a wealth of information — such as details about when people left for work, whether they wore masks in the subway, the name of the stations where they changed trains, the massage parlors and karaoke bars they frequented and the names of the clinics where they were tested for the virus."

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As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets (Published 2020)

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Tracking entire populations to combat the pandemic now could open the doors to more invasive forms of government snooping later.

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Widespread testing is seen as one of the best ways to slow the advance of the COVID-19 pandemic, but another factor may be the ability to access large amounts of personal data.

South Korea's COVID-19 pandemic response has been widely viewed across the globe as an example to study. While widespread testing has been consistently mentioned as a best practice to emulate, less has been said about how crucial the ability to harvest and disclose vast amounts of personally identifiable data was to the South Korean government's success story.

The Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) in South Korea imposes strict compliance requirements on entities that collect any information that could be used to identify a specific person. Individuals also have the right to be forgotten, among other data ownership rights.

While organizations in both the private and public sectors are required to comply with the PIPA, government agencies that require personal data for public interest purposes can collect and use data without the need to obtain consent. Indeed, the South Korean government has ridden on this exception to bring a raging outbreak to heel in a matter of weeks. The ability to collect, process and widely disclose personal data has enabled health authorities to conduct contact-tracing with military precision.

Upon the discovery of a confirmed case of COVID-19 in South Korea, health authorities conduct an epidemiological survey to determine the point of infection and possible close contacts. This process begins with an interview and is enriched using credit card transaction data, mobile phone tracking, and CCTV, which can be provided by private business owners and employers. The result is a detailed hour-by-hour reconstruction of the individual's whereabouts in the days leading up to the confirmation of infection. In some instances, data processors can even determine whether the person in question was wearing a mask at specific times inside certain venues, suggesting that business owners and employers disclose personally identifiable images to the government.

Close contacts identified in the epidemiological survey are then contacted and, if necessary, tested and quarantined. The government also uses the location data to deploy teams to disinfect locations where a confirmed case has been, such as offices and even private residences.

For more on how the COVID-19 pandemic may impact personal data privacy, view this video from the Thomson Reuters Foundation Newsroom.

All of this is done within a matter of hours. Moreover, this data is disclosed to the public via alerts that are sent to smartphones in every district in which a confirmed case has traveled. Individual districts also maintain websites where these alerts are archived and available for public viewing indefinitely. The age, gender, and ethnicity of a confirmed case, as well as the district where he or she resides and works, is also included in these public notifications. As a result, it is probable that these individuals can be identified by members of their community.

Publicly disclosing these details has helped South Korea maintain calm and avoid imposing lockdowns which have further crippled other countries. Privacy concerns have been raised, particularly where individuals have been subject to harassment; however, public perception of the government's response measures in this fully democratic country have generally been positive.

Governments seeking to replicate the approach that South Korea has deployed could be frustrated by personal data protection laws, particularly for jurisdictions subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which mandates enhanced data protection requirements for health data. Data subjects are afforded strong protections and data ownership rights under the regime, including the right to object to data processing in some cases.

Exemptions for epidemic response and public health do exist under the GDPR but they may not extend to the extensive data collection that is necessary to conduct the type of contact-tracing that South Korea is doing. Indeed, European regulators have sought to restrict the collection, sharing, and use of personal health data in recent days. The Italian government's data protection authority (the Garante) has mandated that the collection of data related to COVID-19 can only be carried out by public health authorities. Employers in Italy were also warned that they cannot require employees to disclose whether they are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19. Similarly, the Information Commissioner's Office in the United Kingdom has cautioned businesses not to disclose "more information than necessary" regarding employees who may have contracted COVID-19.

As such, the ability of employers and governments to gather data for contract-tracing may be limited.

Some businesses in the private sector are endeavoring to collect much needed COVID-19 health data in a manner that complies with privacy laws. A startup called Zoe, in partnership with King's College Hospital in London, recently released a COVID-19 symptom-tracking app which asks users to voluntarily disclose health data. The primary purpose of the app is to gather information that could be useful for policy responses.

In contrast, jurisdictions that have made exemptions to data privacy laws to enable local health authorities to conduct aggressive contract-tracing have been comparatively more successful in their pandemic responses. Apart from South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have collected and shared personally identifiable information of confirmed cases. Much of this data has been crucial in aiding policy responses to emerging risks such as spikes in COVID-19 cases from inbound travelers.

The tactics used in Taiwan, which is also a democracy, have generally been well-received, but the discretion of the state's use of personal data has been questioned. In the unitary city-state of Singapore, concerns have been raised over whether health data could be used for other purposes, such as the enforcement of the Protection of Online Falsehoods and Manipulations Act (POFMA).

The COVID-19 pandemic could spark regulatory change and a shift in public perception on a range of topics, including data privacy issues. However, it remains to be seen whether governments that have temporarily given themselves sweeping power to collect data will be able to hang on to that discretion, as well as whether countries lacking such authority will seek it in the aftermath of this pandemic.

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Pervasive personal data collection at the heart of South Korea's COVID-19 success may not translate | Answers On

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Widespread testing is seen as one of the best ways to slow the advance of the COVID-19 pandemic, but another factor may be the ability to access large amounts of personal data. South Korea's COVID-19 pandemic response has been widely viewed across the globe as an example to study.

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Central and local governments in South Korea are sending real-time alerts via text message, apps and online on the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) as well as the travel histories of those infected.

The "self-quarantine safety protection" app, developed by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, allows those who have been quarantined to stay in touch with caseworkers. It also uses GPS to keep track of their location to make sure they are not breaking their quarantine, MIT Technology Review reports.

Officials said the app is not mandatory and telephone calls will still remain an option.

Concerns

The Corona 100m (Co100) app, was launched on February 11 and, using government data, alerts users when they come within 100 metres of a location visited by an infected person. It had a million downloads in its first ten days after launch, according to South Korean government website Korea.net, which said the app "allows users to conveniently avoid potentially dangerous locations without checking the travel histories of those infected".

Meanwhile, the website shows the travel histories of confirmed COVID-19 patients and Coronaita aims to function "like a search engine" for information on coronavirus-hit areas.

The approach has sparked some concerns about information overload and privacy/surveillance.

According to reports, the communications don't identify patients individually but give their gender and age range and assign them a case number.

A new system allows "various data" about confirmed COVID-19 patients to be immediately analysed and provided to health investigators.

The Korea Herald reports that South Korea will advance tracking further from Monday, operating a "smart city technology system" aimed at helping health investigators to quickly check data such as surveillance camera footage and credit card transactions of confirmed COVID-19 patients to recreate their routes.

Previously, the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) investigators had to request and wait for data such as CCTV footage and credit card transactions of confirmed patients from police investigators.

The new system, co-developed by the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and the KCDC, allows "various data" about confirmed COVID-19 patients to be immediately analysed and provided to health investigators. It is based on the 'smart city data hub programme' currently under development by the central government and the municipal government of Daegu.

Opening mask data

The government is also opening up data on the availability of protective masks amid a nationwide shortage and long queues. Data on protective masks sold through public channels is being jointly provided by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and small and medium companies through an open API. Around 10 developers are understood to have used the data so far to launch apps.

The Ministry of Science and ICT noted the importance of "public-private cooperation" such as this to manage the situation. There could be a challenge, though, as Apple and Google are taking measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus misinformation via apps, reports say. This could include rejecting coronavirus-related apps which are not submitted by governments or health authorities.

SmartCitiesWorld has requested further information on the coronavirus tracking systems.
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Central and local governments in South Korea are sending real-time alerts via text message, apps and online on the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) as well as the travel histories of those infected. The "self-quarantine safety protection" app, developed by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, allows those who have been quarantined to stay in touch with caseworkers.

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"...Corona 100m, an application that shows the location of a patient infected with the virus, the date when the infection was confirmed, the nationality, sex and age of the patient. The app warns users when they approach 100m from a location previously visited by an infected person"

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TOKYO, March 9 (Xinhua) -- China is boosting its digital economy amid the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, said Jin Jianmin, a senior fellow at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo.

The Chinese government and information technology companies have worked closely to combat COVID-19 and transform digital technologies at a faster pace, said Jin in a written interview with Xinhua.

In 2019, the digital economy had begun to play a role as a new driving force in China's economic development, the expert said.

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has brought challenges to China's macro-governance and economic development, impacting industries and markets in the short term, he noted.

"In the fight against the virus, digital technology is beginning to play an unprecedented role in the rapid and accurate dissemination of information, the maintenance of daily life and economic and social activities, the development of health care, as well as the recovery of industries and economic activities," Jin said.

"Digital technology developed during this extraordinary period is an opportunity to enhance the country's digital economy," he said.

Firstly, the more frequent use of the Internet during the outbreak will greatly increase Internet penetration in China, Jin said.

Noting that China's Internet penetration rate is about 60 percent, he said the outbreak has allowed Chinese networks to penetrate rapidly into rural and remote areas, as well as reach the elderly population.

"If China's Internet penetration reached or approached the developed world's average of 85 percent, it would generate 200 million to 300 million new Internet users," Jin said.

In that case, according to Jin, not only can China bridge the digital divide, but the new Internet users will also become new digital consumers. Therefore, encouraging and fostering information consumption should be of priority.

Secondly, during the outbreak, many companies adopted telecommuting systems and digital management models, with enterprises applying cloud and other digital technologies to change their business management patterns, Jin said.

Digital technology companies, such as Alibaba and Tencent, are also accelerating the development of APPs to meet users' digital needs and help companies improve their ability to create more value through digitalization, he noted.

Jin said the "health code" system, which began in China's east coast city of Hangzhou, was launched by the local government and IT companies to help restore industrial production and resume day-to-day life.

The expert said he expects macro- and industrial policies to be combined with the digital experience and data collected from the public to bolster digital innovation.

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Interview: China to bolster digital economy amid coronavirus fight

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TOKYO, March 9 (Xinhua) -- China is boosting its digital economy amid the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, said Jin Jianmin, a senior fellow at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. The Chinese government and information technology companies have worked closely to combat COVID-19 and transform digital technologies at a faster pace, said Jin in a written interview with Xinhua.

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"In most cases, that was done not by resorting to debilitating nationwide lockdowns, but rather in part by employing digital tracking, a practice embraced even by strong democracies like South Korea"

"We know the patient’s contacts, where the patient goes and stays, and so we don’t need to lock down everybody,” said Ki Mo-ran, an epidemiologist who is advising the South Korean government’s coronavirus response."

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France Weighs Its Love of Liberty in Fight Against Coronavirus

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The French are cautiously considering digital tracking, which has proved effective in Asia. But can a country that so prizes personal freedom and privacy ever accept it?

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"South Korea will put wristbands on people defying quarantine, after people tricked government tracking apps by leaving their phones at home."

"In response, the government has launched wristbands that tell officials if the person tries to cut it off or leave the home."

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South Korea will put wristbands on people defying quarantine, after people tricked government tracking apps by leaving their phones at home.

57,000 people who entered South Korea after April 1 are confined to their homes for 14 days but more than 160 were caught breaking curfew.

In response, the government has launched wristbands that tell officials if the person tries to cut it off or leave the home.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

South Korea will use wristbands to stop people breaking quarantine because government tracking apps are being easily fooled by curfew breakers who leave their phones at home.

57,000 people who entered South Korea after April 1 have been confined to their homes as a precaution for 14 days, but some are going outside regardless, according to The Associated Press and South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

The government launched several tracking apps that monitor the location of those meant to be in quarantine.

But 160 people have so far been caught violating self-isolation rules.

To counteract the problem, the wristband, which connects to the apps via Bluetooth, will alert officials if the person leaves the home, or tries to destroy the band.

"After deep consideration, the government has decided to put electronic wristbands on people who violate self-isolation rules, such as going outside without notice and not answering phone calls," Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said on Saturday, according to Yonhap.

"We have listened to quarantine experts and gathered opinions from various communities."

The punishment for breaking the curfew can be as much as a year in jail, and a fine of $8,200.

The existence of the wristbands was first floated by Yoon Tae-ho, director general for public health policy at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, at a press conference on Tuesday.

"Most of those who are in quarantine are following protocols well but there have been some violations. We will come up with the most efficient measure after further discussions," Yoon said.

Yoon added that authorities may begin random drop-in visits to those supposedly on lockdown.

Hong Kong rolled out 60,000 versions of a similar bracelet on March 16, which were given to recent arrivals to the country, with limited success.

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South Korea launched wristbands for those breaking quarantine because people were leaving their phones at home to trick government tracking apps

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South Korea will put wristbands on people defying quarantine, after people tricked government tracking apps by leaving their phones at home. 57,000 people who entered South Korea after April 1 are confined to their homes for 14 days but more than 160 were caught breaking curfew.

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"there are possibly awkward revelations about the personal lives of patients — whose identities could be easily figured out by family and friends."

"The digital diaries of infected people grew to cover all kinds of places: bars, karaoke clubs and short-stay “love hotels.” "

"One woman, who asked to be identified only with her surname Seo out of privacy concerns, said she has stopped going to a bar popular with gay women."

“If I unknowingly contract the virus . . . that record will be released to the whole country,” Seo said. “It’s as daunting as being outed in front of the public."

"It’s unclear how much of South Korea’s tracking has lessened the number of possible infections. A certainty though, is that it has attracted “voyeuristic gazes from the people,” said Yoon In-jin, a professor of sociology at Korea University in Seoul.

"“A month into this nationwide experiment, we have yet to gauge its epidemiological effectiveness, but already saw too many virus patients getting ridiculed and judged for places they visited”

"A South Korean — the third confirmed coronavirus patient in the country — was savaged by online trolls after it was revealed that he, while symptomatic, accompanied a Chinese woman to a hotel and a plastic surgery clinic in the upmarket Gangnam district in Seoul.
The woman also tested positive for the coronavirus. Online comments labeled them “a couple in extramarital affair” and accused them of “super-spreading” the virus across the city.
Lee Wang-jun, chairman of Myongji Hospital where the patient was treated, said the man received psychiatric treatment after the online attacks. “It’s time for us to look back at the side effects,” said Cho Sung-il, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University"

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SEOUL - The novel coronavirus outbreak has produced at least one new star in South Korea: the "virus patient travel log."

The South Korean government is publishing the movements of people before they were diagnosed with the virus - retracing their steps using tools such as GPS phone tracking, credit card records, surveillance video and old-fashioned personal interviews with patients.

The idea is to let the public know, via a central website and regional text messages, if they may have crossed paths with carriers, whose names are not made public.

But where some people perceive good intentions, others see Big Brother.

The extensive tracking initiative has raised questions about how to reconcile public health protection and privacy - a growing point of tension in many places around the world as the pandemic spreads.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

Others nations in Asia quickly adopted their own version of South Korea's infection mapping.

Singapore's government hosts a website that includes the age, gender and occupation of all its coronavirus patients - and where they traveled recently.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

Japan's Health Ministry has maintained caution about the release of personal travel history and other details, but some Japanese regions have made public information about patients' movements, including to gyms, restaurants and hospitals.

But challenges are brewing in South Korea.

In southern city of Busan, a coronavirus patient whose personal travel history was released filed an appeal about privacy violations to the National Human Rights Commission, the nation's rights watchdog agency.

The commission appeared to back the complaint. In a statement earlier this week, it called the public disclosures of personal movements "beyond necessity."

People want more

In response, South Korean officials note the obvious: These are not normal times. South Korea has nearly 8,000 confirmed coronavirus infections and at least 66 deaths.

"It is true that public interests tend to be emphasized more than human rights of individuals when dealing with diseases that can infect others," said Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last week.

Jeong said the agency will review the protocols to find the right "balance" between health measures and individual privacy.

Live updates: The latest on the pandemic

But, for many, the travel log is a hit the way it is - and they want even more.

"The phone is ringing off the hook with nervous citizens demanding that more is shared about confirmed virus cases in a faster manner," said Park Wyul-bohk, head of the disaster team in Cheonan, about 50 miles south of Seoul with about 100 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus that causes the disease covid-19.

A Cheonan resident launched a petition to South Korean President Moon Jae-in complaining of the "nerve-racking delay" in the public release of additional virus carrier travel logs. The petition drew more than 22,000 supporters.

The names on the travel logs are kept confidential. But there are possibly awkward revelations about the personal lives of patients - whose identities could be easily figured out by family and friends.

'Love hotels' on the list

In central city of Daejeon,more than 1 million phones receivedan alert saying a virus carrier visited "Magic Coin Karaoke in Jayang-dong at midnight on Feb. 20."

In Cheonan, a text alert to residents showed that an infected person visited "Imperial Foot Massage at 13:46 on Feb. 24."

The digital diaries of infected people grew to cover all kinds of places: bars, karaoke clubs and short-stay "love hotels."

One woman, who asked to be identified only with her surname Seo out of privacy concerns, said she has stopped going to a bar popular with gay women.

"If I unknowingly contract the virus . . . that record will be released to the whole country," Seo said. "It's as daunting as being outed in front of the public."

At the start, the South Korean disease-control center was alone with the details: lists of confirmed cases, sex, age and pre-quarantine movements. It wasn't long before private coders saw the potential for audience views. Several apps have turned the data into comprehensive digital maps.

One of the most visited, coronamap.site developed by a South Korean college student, has drawn more than 14 million hits since the outbreak.

Fear, fever and slow recovery: One man's battle with the coronavirus in South Korea

South Korea has been preparing for this moment. Its strategies have root in a 2015 outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, in South Korea, which was the biggest outside of Saudi Arabia.

The government in Seoul was criticized for holding back data about the hospitals treating MERS patients. South Korea later revised its laws to grant greater access to personal information of infected people. Now, anyone found guilty of lying about details considered necessary for infection containment can be subject to a maximum of two years in prison.

And even a Chinese drone

Nothing, though, compares to the surveillance reach in China, where the coronavirus first flared late last year in Hubei province. Its mass surveillance system allows authorities to pin down infected people's whereabouts to the minute.

Workers in Japan and South Korea rarely call in sick. That's a big problem now.

Last month, the English-language edition of the Global Times, a newspaper controlled by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, released video on Twitter showing drones calling out instructions as they hover above people disobeying health protocols, such as wearing a mask.

"Yes, Auntie, this is the drone speaking to you," a voice booms over an elderly Chinese woman, according to the Global Times's English translation. "You shouldn't walk about without wearing a mask."

It's unclear how much of South Korea's tracking has lessened the number of possible infections. A certainty though, is that it has attracted "voyeuristic gazes from the people," said Yoon In-jin, a professor of sociology at Korea University in Seoul.

"A month into this nationwide experiment, we have yet to gauge its epidemiological effectiveness, but already saw too many virus patients getting ridiculed and judged for places they visited," Yoon said.

Even with names redacted, there are cases where enough information was made public to deduce the patient's identity.

A South Korean - the third confirmed coronavirus patient in the country - was savaged by online trolls after it was revealed that he, while symptomatic, accompanied a Chinese woman to a hotel and a plastic surgery clinic in the upmarket Gangnam district in Seoul.

The woman also tested positive for the coronavirus. Online comments labeled them "a couple in extramarital affair" and accused them of "super-spreading" the virus across the city.

Lee Wang-jun, chairman of Myongji Hospital where the patient was treated, said the man received psychiatric treatment after the online attacks.

"It's time for us to look back at the side effects," said Cho Sung-il, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University who advises South Korea's coronavirus tracing team, "and ponder ways to minimize the impact on people's privacy."

Denyer reported from Tokyo. Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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A 'travel log' of the times in South Korea: Mapping the movements of coronavirus carriers

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SEOUL - The novel coronavirus outbreak has produced at least one new star in South Korea: the "virus patient travel log." The South Korean government is publishing the movements of people before they were diagnosed with the virus - retracing their steps using tools such as GPS phone tracking, credit card records, surveillance video and old-fashioned personal interviews with patients.

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"Routes taken by infected patients are published online regularly, while incoming travellers are required to report their symptoms daily on an app that they have to download on arrival at the airport."

"Moreover, any person with a smartphone in South Korea - almost the entire population, given that nine out of ten South Koreans have one - gets location-based emergency messages that alert them when they are near a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19."

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Seoul, South Korea - South Korea has earned international plaudits for tracking and containing the coronavirus since reporting its first case back in February.

Once the largest outbreak outside of China, South Korea has now managed to push the number of cases confirmed each day to around 50.

More:

Swift action and free or affordable mass-testing have been the country's most effective weapons in countering the virus. But South Korea has also turned to technology for help.

Routes taken by infected patients are published online regularly, while incoming travellers are required to report their symptoms daily on an app that they have to download on arrival at the airport.

Moreover, any person with a smartphone in South Korea - almost the entire population, given that nine out of 10 South Koreans have one - gets location-based emergency messages that alert them when they are near a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19.

People get the messages automatically and are not allowed to opt out.

"I've been getting these messages maybe six, seven or even 10 times a day," Cho TW, a university student, told Al Jazeera.

"Now, I know which areas to avoid and I do feel like the government is doing a good job at keeping me informed."

Signs of fatigue

But as the outbreak drags on and the messages continue to buzz on phones around the country in unison, people are showing signs of fatigue.

Raj Sharman, a professor at the University of Buffalo's Management Science and Systems Department, studies the relationship between disaster mitigation and technology. According to his research, the effectiveness of text message alerts depends on the type of emergency at hand.

"When it comes to emergency notifications, how people comply really varies by the context. The impact of the messaging is actually based on one's perception of the threat," Sharman said.

"We tend to look at all disasters as the same but a small storm is very different from an active shooter situation, which is very different from a building fire."

In other words, how people respond to text messages with government advice reflects not only their personal beliefs but societal and cultural pressures.

"Text messages definitely would be effective at least in getting people to know about the situation, but the next question is compliance. If someone thinks COVID-19 is not life-threatening, they may not be as compliant [to health recommendations] as others," Wencui Han, an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Also, if the people around me don't care, then maybe I don't think I have to follow [recommendations]. But if we all, for example, are staying at home and taking these messages seriously, then this influences everyone else."

Steady stream of alerts

At least 10,384 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in South Korea as of April 8, but more than half have already been cured. At least 200 people have died of the disease.

The text alerts are sent out at the discretion of regional governments and specifically target people in those areas, giving them an opportunity to avoid locations where active cases have been found.

The government overseeing Jongno-gu - a district in Seoul with a population of nearly 158,000 - compiles an anonymous list of patients on their website. The site includes their area of residence and where they are currently hospitalised, along with where they have been and at what time.

As one text message alert from the Jongno-gu government reads: "A 15th foreigner in Jongno-gu staying at the Somerset Palace Hotel in Seoul has tested positive. For more information, such as their path of movement, please visit our website."

Sharman says it is hard to judge how effective such text messages are but his studies have found alerts related to slow-developing disasters tend to generate less interest and compliance.

In addition, each individual's perception of the risk from COVID-19 would also affect their behaviour and the impact of the message.

Becoming a nuisance

Some South Koreans - who have been receiving these messages on a daily basis for weeks - are starting to see the alerts as a nuisance.

Lee Yeon-ha, a university student majoring in film and media arts, says the messages have become "very annoying."

"I cannot disagree with the fact that it's good for people to know if there are infected people visiting the same places that they might go to," he said. "But I think the government is sending these messages too frequently ... I know I stopped reading them."

Lee may not be the only one suffering from alert fatigue.

"There are studies that suggest that, if you use text messages for cases of non-emergency, they do lose effectiveness. Also, if they send too many messages, people tend to ignore them," Sharman said. "This happens even in a healthcare context."

In a study of emergency messages on university campuses, Han and her colleagues found that "if you send alerts very often, students will start to ignore this channel. But if alerts are sent rarely, then it's seen as very critical and they will understand that."

Will other countries follow?

Other governments have also turned to technology to battle the virus - using apps to monitor people in quarantine or send reminders on lockdown rules.

But privacy issues are already being raised and even in South Korea some have expressed concerns over the government's data-sharing strategy, since specific details about an infected person's path could ultimately reveal their identity.

Information published online and sent to phone users can name specific bars, restaurants or hotels. So, even though patients' names are kept anonymous, a detailed timeline of their whereabouts combined with a person's area of residence may reveal who they are.

"In South Korea, people have been tracked to the point where they could be identified. Their implementation arguably compromised their citizens' privacy and this is a question we have to think about and challenge in a democracy," Sharman said.

Privacy concerns

Sharman said that some local privacy laws in the western countries such as the US might prevent sending out the equivalent of South Korea's emergency alerts but the greater issue to overcome would be cultural expectations around privacy.

"When governments start using location-based technologies - identifying your location and tracking you - that would be a new experience to Americans. We have always preached against government oversight," he said.

"But in collectivistic societies like India, China and South Korea, the desire for greater privacy is a lower threshold than what we have in Western countries, especially when there is an argument for greater public good."

"In general, emergency messages are very, very rare in the United States," Han added.

However, South Korea was not always so forthcoming with patients' information.

During the 2015 MERS outbreak, Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon criticised the national government, accusing it of failing to monitor suspected MERS patients and withholding information from the public.

That is a far cry from the situation now. As Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-Wha put it in a recent interview with the BBC, the country's new approach "is openness, transparency and fully keeping the public informed."

For Lee, the university student, privacy is merely a necessary trade-off given how easily the virus spreads.

"I am concerned about the privacy of infected people, but I think we should all understand the government's decision," he said. "If I got the virus, I would provide my details to the government without hesitating."

For now, it is unclear whether other countries such as the US - which reported its first case at the same time as South Korea but now has the most COVID-19 cases in the world - will consider a similar alert system.

But the technological infrastructure is certainly there, and Sharman believes it can be implemented in a way that does not compromise privacy.

"I don't know if what South Korea did was right. It's something I wouldn't like. But then again, I am from the US," Sharman said.
Mitch S Shin contributed to this report

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S Korea's smartphone apps tracking coronavirus won't stop buzzing

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Seoul, South Korea - South Korea has earned international plaudits for tracking and containing the coronavirus since reporting its first case back in February. Once the largest outbreak outside of China, South Korea has now managed to push the number of cases confirmed each day to around 50.

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"...the authorities can require telecoms companies to hand over the mobile phone data of people with confirmed infections to track their location. The data has enabled the rapid deployment of a notification system alerting Koreans to the movements of all potentially contagious people in their neighbourhoods or buildings."

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When the World Health Organization launched a 2007 initiative to eliminate malaria on Zanzibar, it turned to an unusual source to track the spread of the disease between the island and mainland Africa: mobile phones sold by Tanzania's telecoms groups including Vodafone, the UK mobile operator.

Working together with researchers at Southampton university, Vodafone began compiling sets of location data from mobile phones in the areas where cases of the disease had been recorded.

Mapping how populations move between locations has proved invaluable in tracking and responding to epidemics. The Zanzibar project has been replicated by academics across the continent to monitor other deadly diseases, including Ebola in west Africa.

"Diseases don't respect national borders," says Andy Tatem, an epidemiologist at Southampton who has worked with Vodafone in Africa. "Understanding how diseases and pathogens flow through populations using mobile phone data is vital."

With much of Europe at a standstill as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, politicians want the telecoms operators to provide similar data from smartphones. Thierry Breton, the former chief executive of France Telecom who is now the European commissioner for the internal market, has called on operators to hand over aggregated location data to track how the virus is spreading and to identify spots where help is most needed.

Both politicians and the industry insist that the data sets will be "anonymised", meaning that customers' individual identities will be scrubbed out. Mr Breton told the Financial Times: "In no way are we going to track individuals. That's absolutely not the case. We are talking about fully anonymised, aggregated data to anticipate the development of the pandemic."

But the use of such data to track the virus has triggered fears of growing surveillance, including questions about how the data might be used once the crisis is over and whether such data sets are ever truly anonymous.

The debate over the use of location data sets could be a forerunner to a broader discussion about civil liberties and surveillance in Europe and the US as governments put in place plans to lift at least parts of the lockdowns.

The strategies for reopening an economy before a vaccine is developed could involve monitoring the contacts of newly infected people, which will raise questions about how much curtailment of privacy societies are prepared to take.

In South Korea, which is seen as a benchmark of how to control infectious diseases, the authorities can require telecoms companies to hand over the mobile phone data of people with confirmed infections to track their location. The data has enabled the rapid deployment of a notification system alerting Koreans to the movements of all potentially contagious people in their neighbourhoods or buildings.

China and Israel have also used personal telecoms data to trace coronavirus patients and their contacts. Governments around the world are creating apps to gather more personal data, such as who is sick and with whom they have been in contact.

Even the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which was adopted in 2018, has a clause allowing exceptions for cases that are in the public interest.

Data discoveries

Vittorio Colao, former Vodafone chief executive now at General Atlantic, says people should be willing to allow the use of "pseudo-anonymised" data by health services such as Britain's National Health Service to respond to the pandemic. Originally from northern Italy, he says citizens understand the need to trust authorities to handle their data.

"It is not a question of spying on everyone forever but of saving lives for a time that demands temporary rules," he says. "We trust Uber to know everywhere we go, we trust Gmail with everything we write. If we don't trust the NHS with our health data then who do we trust?"

Vincent Keunen, founder of app developer Andaman7 in Belgium who works on ways to securely share health data, says citizens have legitimate concerns about vast amounts of data being used to track them individually. But he says it is a tricky balance to strike between using technology to help tackle health crises and safeguarding privacy.

"The use of technology should end as soon as the health of the people is guaranteed. We must be vigilant," he says. "If you go to one extreme, you'll have super high privacy but then you die and it becomes useless to have privacy. It's a very delicate balance to reach."

The use of location data to track the disease has been applied in Italy, Spain, Norway and Belgium, with the UK, Portugal and Greece set to follow.

In cities such as Madrid and Milan, telecoms operators have created heat maps that show how restrictions on movement are working and what effect the presence of police on the streets is having on behaviour.

Telecoms companies in Spain were able to show that the movement of people in one city dropped 90 per cent during the first week of the lockdown and a further 60 per cent of the remainder in the second week, while in Italy the lockdown was largely ignored for the first week, with between 800,000 and 1m people still travelling in and out of Milan.

In Belgium, the data showed that long distance trips of more than 40km dropped 95 per cent after confinement measures were introduced. Belgians are spending 80 per cent of their time within their home postal area, with mobility down 54 per cent. The data can show if large numbers of people in cities have fled for their second homes, as was the case in France.

The insights that telecoms companies can derive from these data sets build on their experience of working with epidemiologists to track infectious diseases in the developing world. Telenor, the Norwegian company, has participated in big data projects to predict the spread of dengue fever in Pakistan and malaria in Bangladesh. Kenth Engo-Monsen, a senior researcher at Telenor, says it was able to show that movement between Norwegian cities dropped 65 per cent after restrictions were applied.

"Knowledge about a population's travel pattern is vital to understanding how an epidemic spreads throughout a country," he says.

Telefónica, Spain's national carrier which owns networks across Latin America, has developed expertise working with companies like Facebook to use data to deal with natural disasters such as earthquakes. It also worked with Unicef and the University of Notre-Dame in 2017 to improve epidemiological models for predicting the spread of the Zika virus in Colombia.

Prof Tatem cites coastal areas in Namibia as an example of where heat maps detailing migration into heavily infected areas can be used to prioritise other areas where bed nets and insecticides need to be deployed.

Vodafone has a researcher paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation embedded in its data team at the company's London headquarters, to work on data sets providing insights to academics tracking a variety of diseases.

Nick Read, chief executive of Vodafone, says the team offers invaluable insights. "We have seen how aggregated data can check the spread of disease in Africa. We're now using the same insights to understand and combat the spread of Covid-19 in Europe," he says.

European telecoms companies remain adamant that the information that has been provided to governments is anonymised and aggregated. That means it cannot be traced to any specific individual or phone. The process of scrubbing the data usually takes between 24 and 48 hours before it is available in data sets that can then be used by governments.

The industry insists that data about users is of little use for big data analysis of the contagion: the best way to track the spread of the pandemic is to use heatmaps built on data of multiple phones which, if overlaid with medical data, can predict how the virus will spread and determine whether government measures are working.

Telecoms companies say they are frustrated with the confusion between the kind of group data they are providing and the personal data that can be gleaned from apps on mobile phones. In Europe, personal information, such as whether someone has coronavirus and has shared that on social media or searched on Google for symptoms, is not legally accessible under GDPR by a telecoms provider.

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Still, assurances from officials and industry executives have done little to appease anxiety that privacy rights could be brushed aside as governments seek to use tools of mass surveillance in their efforts to combat the virus. The concerns about political use of data have been aggravated by the fact that the European Commission wants the telecoms companies to provide the actual aggregated data, not just access to insights from that information.

Latvia, for example, has exercised its right to be exempted from certain obligations in the European Convention of Human Rights, which grants citizens privacy and data protection rights. Slovakia passed a law last month to use telecoms data to ensure people abide by quarantine laws.

Some researchers are not convinced by the claim that such data sets are completely anonymous. A 2019 study by researchers at Imperial College London and Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain revealed there is a way to re-identify 99.98 per cent of individuals with just 15 demographic characteristics using location data. Other studies have come to similar conclusions that individuals can be identified based on aggregate data sets with relative ease. Spain's far-right Vox party has urged people to turn off their mobile data, reflecting the anger over government intrusion on their privacy.

Austrian data privacy activist Max Schrems warns citizens should be careful of the rights they are giving away at a time of global panic. "I am worried that we will accept state surveillance during the health crisis but that it will then take years in court to get rid of it."

However, he says there are apps that help citizens choose which data they share, leading to a more efficient tracking of the virus. "If people can decide themselves if they want to participate or not, then we have privacy-friendly alternatives. That's a game changer."

Some analysts worry that the data sets could be put to other uses in the future.

"They need to demand reassurances from governments [that the data] won't be repurposed. The last thing they want is to wake up after Covid-19 and find that the data is still being used for other purposes. How do you police who is using it?" asks one industry executive. "There has to be a sunset clause."

The telecoms industry has had to tread a fine line on the use of data or face punitive action. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission last month fined the four largest industry players a combined $208m over the historic sale of location data to third parties without the explicit consent of users.

Francisco Montalvo, Telefónica's chief data officer, argues that governments need to combine the need to use the data without endangering privacy rights. "Governments and regulators should find a proper balance between privacy and public interest," he says.

Many of these issues come to a head with the health apps which have been widely used in Asia and are gradually being introduced in Europe to track an individual's health status.

Germany's Robert Koch Institut has introduced an app, developed with Berlin digital health group Thryve,which links to fitness bands and smartwatches. It says the app will help it map the spread of Covid-19 by monitoring anonymised data for signs of infection including a user's resting pulse, sleep and activity levels, which tend to alter significantly in the case of acute respiratory problems.

The data drawn from such apps can both track individual sufferers and people they have encountered via contract tracing methods to create a much deeper data set for governments.

Find the latest here.

In Singapore, the government has asked citizens to opt in to its system and European governments including Germany have stressed that the use of tracking and tracing apps must be done on a voluntary basis.

"This is nowhere near the South Korean or Chinese or Israeli model where they have the power to track you, know you have the disease and who you know. We are nowhere near there," says Enrique Medina, chief policy officer for Telefónica, which is working with the Spanish government.

The European Commission is working on guidelines on the use of tracing apps. Vera Jourova, vice-president for values and transparency, says citizens must be able to give informed consent.

"There must not be a hidden purpose or something I as a citizen don't know," she says. "The main thing is people entering such a system know what they are doing."

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Under pressure from privacy activists, the scientific community has created a body called the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing coalition in Switzerland, led by Germany's Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, to create standards for apps being developed that adhere to European laws around privacy.

The GSM Association, the mobile telecoms trade body, has also published a blueprint for best practice in how data gathered through apps is handled.

Juan Rio, who specialises in analytics at telecoms consultancy Delta Partners, says there will always be a trade-off between the common good and civil liberties in a time of crisis but questioned the efficacy of governments forcing citizens into using apps, as they may rebel and stop using their phones.

"With the invasive way, you are affecting the experiment. You change the behaviour of people and you cannot trust the results," he says.
Additional reporting by Edward White in Seoul and Sam Fleming in Brussels

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Tracking coronavirus: big data and the challenge to privacy | Free to read

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When the World Health Organization launched a 2007 initiative to eliminate malaria on Zanzibar, it turned to an unusual source to track the spread of the disease between the island and mainland Africa: mobile phones sold by Tanzania's telecoms groups including Vodafone, the UK mobile operator.

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How China's using surveillance to fight coronavirus

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China is using its high tech system to tackle the outbreak, but is the state interference justified?

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Video with the founder of one of the apps/websites talking

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Business

Although it was hit hard by the coronavirus, South Korea managed to rein it in quickly without a shutdown. No one knows for sure how it was done, but making use of internet technology to track cases and travel information seems to have helped.

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South Korea uses technology to control coronavirus | DW | 30.03.2020

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Although it was hit hard by the coronavirus, South Korea managed to rein it in quickly without a shutdown. No one knows for sure how it was done, but making use of internet technology to track cases and travel information seems to have helped.

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"South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19."

"As case numbers grew, authorities launched a massive contact-tracing and testing regime to identify and then isolate infected people"

"When a person tests positive, their city or district might send out an alert to people living nearby about their movements before being diagnosed. A typical alert can contain the infected person’s age and gender, and a detailed log of their movements down to the minute."

"The idea is that a person with mild symptoms can check the travel logs to see whether they might have come in contact with an infected person, which could help medical officials decide who should be screened, says Sung-il Cho, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University. He thinks authorities are justified in making location information public for this purpose."

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For the past month, South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19. Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people's movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it's useful to make those data public. Some say it could even be harmful.

The first cases in the country were reported in late January, and then surged a few weeks later. As case numbers grew, authorities launched a massive contact-tracing and testing regime to identify and then isolate infected people, even setting up drive-through testing centres. So far, the country has tested more people per capita than any country in the world - a total of nearly 300,000 people. As of 17 March, the country had reported 8,413 cases.

When a person tests positive, their city or district might send out an alert to people living nearby about their movements before being diagnosed. A typical alert can contain the infected person's age and gender, and a detailed log of their movements down to the minute - in some cases traced using closed-circuit television and credit-card transactions, with the time and names of businesses they visited. In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet and whether or not they wore a mask. Even overnight stays at 'love motels' have been noted.

Other countries, including Singapore, have released data such as the age or gender of people with COVID-19, but nothing as detailed as in South Korea.

Public trust

The South Korean government says the public is more likely to trust it if it releases transparent and accurate information about the virus, including travel histories of confirmed patients. Laws passed since the country's last major disease outbreak, of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2015, now specifically allow authorities to publish this information.

Numerous websites and smartphone apps have also sprung up to collect and map the data, such as coronamap.site. Checking the maps has become part of daily life for many South Koreans.

Experts and the World Health Organization say that South Korea's extensive tracing, testing and isolation measures - along with campaigns encouraging people to avoid large gatherings - have helped to reduce the virus's spread. Over the past two weeks, the number of new cases being reported each day in South Korea has dropped dramatically, from a peak of 909 cases announced on 29 February to 74 on 16 March.

But the specificity of the publicly available data has raised privacy concerns. The data trails released about some of the infected people have been so detailed that they could be identifiable, say some researchers and human-rights activists.

It might be useful for epidemiologists to "privately and securely have this information on hand, especially for contact tracing", says Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts. But she says she's not sure that publicizing such information is worth the risk of exposing people to the social stigma that might come if their community knows they are infected. The potential for stigma could even dissuade some infected people from coming forward to get tested, says Majumder.

Human-rights concerns

On 9 March, Choi Young-ae, chair of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, also expressed concern that the "excessive disclosure of private information" could cause people with symptoms to avoid testing.

In response, South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on 14 March that such detailed location information should be released only when epidemiological investigations could not otherwise identify all the people with whom an infected person had been in contact before their diagnosis.

The idea is that a person with mild symptoms can check the travel logs to see whether they might have come in contact with an infected person, which could help medical officials decide who should be screened, says Sung-il Cho, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University. He thinks authorities are justified in making location information public for this purpose.

But he says an unintended consequence has been that people are avoiding places that an infected person has visited, even though the places have been closed and cleaned since then.

Personal hygiene and social distancing are more important than looking up websites to avoid places that infected people have visited, says Oh Myoung-don, an infectious-disease physician at Seoul National University.

Legacy of infection

South Korea's data transparency during this outbreak has its origins in how the government handled the 2015 outbreak of MERS, which reportedly infected 186 people in South Korea and killed 36. The government at the time initially refused to identify the hospitals in which infected people were being treated, but a software programmer made a map of cases based on crowdsourced reports and anonymous tips from hospital staff. Eventually, the government relented and named the affected hospitals.

The public broadly supports the government publishing individuals' movement, says Youngkee Ju, a researcher in health journalism at Hallym University in Chuncheon. In 1,000-person surveys that he co-authored, published in February and earlier this month, most respondents supported the government sharing travel details of people with COVID-19. Furthermore, most "preferred the public good to individual rights", says Ju. He and his colleagues intend to perform a follow-up survey to find out exactly how much personal information the public supports disclosing.

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South Korea is reporting intimate details of COVID-19 cases: has it helped?

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For the past month, South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19. Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people's movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it's useful to make those data public.

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As China's coronavirus outbreak continues, unprecedented quarantine measures have been imposed affecting some 58 million people. To date, there are nearly 80,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and more than 77,000 of them are in China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has described the coronavirus outbreak as the "largest public health emergency" since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Despite Beijing's promises of stamping out social and economic disparities, inequality remains a major problem in China. The coronavirus crisis has come to clearly demonstrate the impact of these inequalities on public health and access to services. Experts warn low- and middle-income Chinese will suffer the most as the epidemic continues.

"Income disparity certainly makes a lot of difference in crisis-stricken China, and Hubei in particular," Kent Deng, a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, told DW.

The cost of food, medicines and supplies have peaked since the outbreak, but "those with a deep pocket will be able to maintain their lifestyle regardless," Deng said, adding that lower and middle classes "will become impoverished this time next year" once their savings have dried up.

According to the economist, China's "well-to-do class" counts for around 50 million in a total population of 1.4 billion. "The vast majority living hand to mouth cannot possibly afford the outbreak of the new virus," he warned.

Read more: Coronavirus: How hospitals in China's Wuhan kept the sick away
No safety net for informal workers
The city of Wuhan in China's Hubei province -the epicenter of the virus outbreak - was placed under lockdown on January 23. Professor Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, said that the "rich in Wuhan enjoy much better conditions with the lockdown in place."

For those who can afford it, there is home delivery available of meals, groceries, and certain medicines in quarantined cities like Wuhan. Delivery drivers wearing face masks deliver anything imaginable to people's homes - from face masks to margaritas.

Alongside doctors and nurses, delivery workers have also been hailed as "heroes" by many in China for their hard work. They are also praised for risking their own health to keep the virus from spreading by helping others stay at home.

However, food delivery drivers or small shop workers cannot stop working because they lack savings or social support. Many delivery drivers are also stigmatized as potential carriers of the coronavirus.

Read more: Coronavirus: China mainly interested in 'safeguarding the regime'

White-collar professionals can afford to stay home and often have sufficient savings that allow them to halt work for a period of time. Many white-collar jobs can also be done remotely.

"Many workers are employed informally, which makes it impossible to receive social security protection such as unemployment insurance ... it's difficult for them to be out of work and they are more vulnerable to catching the virus," said Christina Maags, a lecturer in Chinese politics at London's SOAS China Institute.

She added that China's underdeveloped welfare state exacerbates inequalities as low-income workers are not protected by a social safety net.

According to Fei Yan, an associate professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University, lower-income Chinese living in cities are also vulnerable to overcrowding and lack of healthcare options.

For example, in smaller houses and apartments, it is more difficult to separate sick and healthy family members.

"If a case breaks out in a poor family without a two-story house, it might be a tragedy in the end," Yan said.

Read more: Coronavirus: A dramatic escape from Wuhan's lockdown

Which industries have already been hit by the coronavirus?

It's Germany. Always be prepared!

A quarantine hall at Frankfurt Airport has already been set up for coronavirus evacuees. In 2018, there were more than 1 million people who arrived from China. Most passengers from China arriving in Germany usually land in Frankfurt. The most important Chinese hubs with connections to Germany are the airports in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. There are no direct flights to and from Wuhan.

Author: Dirk Kaufmann

The power of 'guanxi' networking
"Social status is highly relevant to health, as well as access to information and network support," said Yan, adding that it is important for China to establish a more comprehensive social welfare system to serve the country's "underprivileged social groups."

Travel has also become a right of the rich in China. Since the outbreak, travel restrictions have been imposed that will keep the average person from moving. But those who know the right people can sometimes still get around.

"When people have received approval to travel abroad, or were able to buy plane tickets, this is commonly not only the result of being able to pay, but also of knowing the right people," said Maags, adding that China's wealthy were more likely to have political connections which "enable them to circumvent restrictions others face, especially during a health crisis."

Personalized networks of power in China are known as "Guanxi," and in China money and connections go hand in hand.

"Cases in which high-income people have managed to escape abroad demonstrate the pervasiveness of corruption in China, where your 'guanxi' networks are equally as important as the money you have," said Maags.

However, money and connections cannot shield everyone from coronavirus. Expert Deng said that the crisis might change how Chinese perceive their society and government.

"The picture is rather ugly," said Deng. The coronavirus epidemic is "certainly doing very little to support the overpublicized 'China Dream.' Rather, it may well be the 'China Nightmare.'"

Read more: Why a coronavirus upsurge could be devastating for South Asia

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Coronavirus exposes the divide between China's rich and poor | DW | 25.02.2020

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As China's coronavirus outbreak continues, unprecedented quarantine measures have been imposed affecting some 58 million people. To date, there are nearly 80,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and more than 77,000 of them are in China. Chinese President Xi Jinping has described the coronavirus outbreak as the "largest public health emergency" since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

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Will online education widen Asia's digital divide?

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Some students may be at a disadvantage as e-learning relies heavily on home environments, experts say

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A man who had traveled to Wuhan - the city at the heart of China's coronavirus crisis - was surprised when police showed up at his door after he returned home, asking to check his temperature.

The man, who had quarantined himself at home in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, said he had not told anyone about his recent trip to the city. But by trawling through travel data from Wuhan, local authorities were able to identify him and dispatch officers to his home a week ago, according to a newspaper article posted by the Nanjing government.

As Chinese authorities race to contain the spread of a new virus, which has infected more than 34,000 people and killed more than 700 in China, Beijing is turning to a familiar set of tools to find and prevent potential infections: data tracking and artificial intelligence.

Several Chinese tech firms have developed apps to help people check if they have taken the same flight or train as confirmed virus patients, scraping data from lists published by state media.

In Guangzhou, southern Guangdong province, robots at one public plaza have even been deployed to scold passersby who are not wearing masks, according to the state-run Global Times.

And in Beijing, one neighborhood committee responsible for an apartment complex of about 2,400 households said they used flight and train data to keep track of everyone's recent travel record.

"Use big data technology to track, screen priority (cases), and effectively forecast the development of the epidemic in real time," China's National Health Commission (NHC) told local governments in an online statement Tuesday.

"Strengthen the information link between ... public security and transportation, and other departments," it said, urging them to share train, flight, communication and medical data.

As Chinese authorities search for potential infections, a point of focus has been detecting fevers, a common symptom of the disease.

While neighborhoods and office buildings rely primarily on hand-held thermometers, public transport hubs are also trialing fever-detection systems that use AI and infrared cameras.

In Beijing, a system developed by Chinese search giant Baidu screens travelers at the Qinghe railway station using infrared and facial-recognition technology, which automatically photographs each person's face.

If someone has a body temperature of 37.3 (99 F) or above, the system sets off an alarm - prompting a secondary check by station staff.

On Thursday, railway personnel, clutching red-and-white megaphones, ordered passengers arriving from northern Shanxi province to slow down as they passed Baidu's system. According to the company, its system can check more than 200 people a minute, far faster than the thermal scanners used at airports.

Megvii, an AI firm that was blacklisted by the U.S. in October over alleged rights abuses, has developed a similar system, which is currently being used at a subway station in Beijing.

"Having a team of nearly 100 people working together remotely from home hasn't been easy," said a spokesperson at Megvii in an emailed statement.

"All of them are working around the clock during Lunar New Year public holidays," said the company, adding that the team had to optimize its models to "effectively detect temperature with only the forehead exposed."

Besides fever detection, Chinese tech firms have raced to develop a wide variety of services to help with epidemic control efforts, from preparing drone deliveries of medical supplies to mapping the spread of the virus from Wuhan.

Although the city has been under effective quarantine since Jan. 23, some 5 million travelers left Wuhan during the Lunar New Year festival, according to the city mayor - galvanizing a nationwide search for recent Wuhan visitors.

Still, the majority of tracking carried out by local authorities in China requires a lot of manpower, though some are entering data online to help with registration, especially as residents return after the holiday.

In Beijing, some neighborhoods are prompting residents to scan a QR code to fill out personal details, such as their phone number and hometown address. One form also prompted participants to fill out details on their mode of transport, such as license plate or flight number, if they had traveled.

It also asked if they had "recently" visited Hubei province - where Wuhan is the capital - or come into contact with anyone from the hard-hit region.

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China tapping AI and big data to get a grip on coronavirus outbreak | The Japan Times

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A man who had traveled to Wuhan - the city at the heart of China's coronavirus crisis - was surprised when police showed up at his door after he returned home, asking to check his temperature. The man, who had quarantined himself at home in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, said he had not told anyone about his recent trip to the city.

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As the number of coronavirus infections increases across the world, Australia has launched an app for tracing those who have come in contact with confirmed patients. This comes amid concerns that such smartphone apps may infringe upon citizens' privacy.

Using a Bluetooth wireless signal, the COVIDSafe app allows health officials to access crucial information about a person's interactions if they contract the virus. All mobile phone numbers within a 1.5-meter range of the infected person - for 15 minutes or more - will be stored.
China
Health apps have been a crucial element of China's race to prevent a second wave of COVID-19 infections. Users scan QR codes to share information about their health status and travel history. These codes need to be scanned before boarding buses and trains or entering airports, offices and even their own housing complexes.

Different colors on the apps indicate different levels of risk, with green codes granted unrestricted movement, yellow codes for seven days of quarantine, and red codes for those who required 14 days of quarantine.

The apps can trace whether users have been in contact with infected people.
Italy
As Italy mulls measures for a gradual lifting of its coronavirus lockdown, the country is working on an app that would trace people who have come in contact with a confirmed case. Acknowledging concerns over privacy and data control, innovation minister Paola Pisano said it would help in bringing the country back towards relative normalcy.

A fast tender was launched for the app - to cover monitoring and medical support - towards the end of March, receiving hundreds of proposals that are currently being assessed.

The app would work on a voluntary basis and have a clearly defined objective.
South Korea
South Korea was one of the first countries to experience a coronavirus outbreak and used massive testing and technology to emerge as a case study for controlling the number of cases nationwide.

South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) runs COVID-19 Smart Management System (SMS), a contact tracing system that runs through smartphone apps and helps the authorities analyze the movement of affected patients and those in quarantine.

The country will also begin strapping electronic wristbands on those who ignore home-quarantine orders. A refusal to use the band would result in the person being moved to a shelter, which they will have to pay for themselves.
India
The Indian government has launched a smartphone app called AarogyaSetu to help track coronavirus patients and the people they come in contact with. According to authorities, the app has recorded 75 million downloads.

Available in 11 languages, the app was launched on both Andriod and iOS. It uses Bluetooth technology to allow people to check whether there is a coronavirus case in their vicinity.
Germany
After pushing for a home-grown alternative, Germany has changed tracks to back an approach supported by US tech giants Apple and Google.

The German-led alternative was called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), with the country's Fraunhofer HHI research institute and the Robert Koch Institute public health body as key players. It received criticism over a central database.

It has now chosen to support Apple and Google's approach, with decentralized software architecture. The data, in this case, will be stored on users' phones.
>> Every evening at 1830 UTC, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. Sign up to receive it directly here.

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Coronavirus tracking apps: How are countries monitoring infections? | DW | 27.04.2020

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As the number of coronavirus infections increases across the world, Australia has launched an app for tracing those who have come in contact with confirmed patients. This comes amid concerns that such smartphone apps may infringe upon citizens' privacy.

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The facial recognition helmets police have been wearing about Shanghai have been converted into fever finders. Nothing instills public trust during an outbreak quite like robocop-style gear to target the sick. Also generally these thermal cameras aren’t super effective.

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The facial recognition helmets police have been wearing about Shanghai have been converted into fever finders. Nothing instills public trust during an outbreak quite like robocop-style gear to target the sick. Also generally these thermal cameras aren’t super effective. https://t.co/FUmAeCSJGy

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The facial recognition helmets police have been wearing about Shanghai have been converted into fever finders. Nothing instills public trust during an outbreak quite like robocop-style gear to target the sick. Also generally these thermal cameras aren’t super effective. pic.twitter.com/FUmAeCSJGy
— Paul Mozur 孟建國 (@paulmozur) March 4, 2020

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The facial recognition helmets police have been wearing about Shanghai have been converted into fever finders. Nothing instills public trust during an outbreak quite like robocop-style gear to target the sick. Also generally these thermal cameras aren’t super effective. https://t.co/FUmAeCSJGy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The facial recognition helmets police have been wearing about Shanghai have been converted into fever finders. Nothing instills public trust during an outbreak quite like robocop-style gear to target the sick. Also generally these thermal cameras aren’t super effective. https://t.co/FUmAeCSJGy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
The facial recognition helmets police have been wearing about Shanghai have been converted into fever finders. Nothing instills public trust during an outbreak quite like robocop-style gear to target the sick. Also generally these thermal cameras aren’t super effective.

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(Yicai Global) Feb. 26 -- Chinese tech firm Kuang-Chi Technologies has developed a smart helmet that Covid-19 prevention and control staff can use to automatically pinpoint people running fevers.

The apparatus thus identifies and targets people who are high-risk for virus transmission in heavily-traveled public areas.

The artificial intelligence-based device looks much like a motorcycle helmet, and monitoring personnel wearing it can quickly measure the body temperatures of people passing in crowds within a range of three to five meters. The helmet emits both a visual and audio alert once it identifies someone with an elevated reading, Shanghai Observer reported.

The headgear can scan the body temperatures of hundreds of people and lock onto those with fever in less than two minutes. It also overcomes the difficulties of sniffing out abnormal temperatures in timely, accurate and effective manner in complex scenarios, the Zhejiang province-based firm stated, adding the entire process is highly efficient and occurs from a safe distance without any contact, and thus it is safe for both staffers and those surveyed.

A big general hospital with 10 of the instruments, a large business district with five to 10, and a subway station with up to three can detect and identify all people who pose a hazard in these areas, the firm estimates.

Editor: Ben Armour

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Chinese Tech Firm Debuts Five-Meter Fever-Finding Smart Helmet

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(Yicai Global) Feb. 26 -- Chinese tech firm Kuang-Chi Technologies has developed a smart helmet that Covid-19 prevention and control staff can use to automatically pinpoint people running fevers. The apparatus thus identifies and targets people who are high-risk for virus transmission in heavily-traveled public areas.

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Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck.

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Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck. https://t.co/rettbnhbWW

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The police part is a big step. Firms like Ali often share data with gov't, but there’s a process. In this case, the moment a user grants permissions, it runs a function “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice.” That's a new level of police tracking embedded in a hugely popular app. https://t.co/ZD3gGy7p9f

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Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck. pic.twitter.com/rettbnhbWW
— Paul Mozur 孟建國 (@paulmozur) March 2, 2020

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As the number of new coronavirus cases drops and life-or-death fears subside for many Chinese, the country is beginning to confront a new challenge-the psychological strain of hundreds of millions of lives overturned by the government's battle against the illness.

Liu Xiaoxian, a 25-year-old television producer from Wuhan, the center of the epidemic, is tormented by guilt at being separated for more than a month from her parents. They developed coughs after going out maskless to shop for groceries not far from the market...

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Fear, Anxiety and Guilt: The Psychological Toll of China's Coronavirus War

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As the number of new coronavirus cases drop and life-or-death fears subside for many Chinese, the country is beginning to confront a new challenge-the psychological strain of hundreds of millions of lives overturned by the government's war on the virus.

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For South Koreans worried about the spread of coronavirus, a new wave of unofficial websites has emerged to help them keep track of neighbours who have been infected.

If you're a resident of the coastal city of Pohang, for instance, firing up coronamap.live and zooming in on your city presents you with a sea of green, orange and red map markers

Click on the markers, and you can instantly see the movements of individual people who have contracted the disease in stunning detail.

One set of markers shows that a resident with the virus started their day at a gym, before grabbing some food and going shopping from 12.40pm to 1.40pm before eventually being admitted to hospital.

Another site lists the latest statistics on the virus in South Korea, along with a database of infected people and their minute-by-minute movements in the days before they went to hospital.

Most people in the database are described as "under treatment." Occasionally, their status switches to "dead" - represented by a grey box.

Websites like these have exploded in popularity as residents seek more precise information on how and where coronavirus has spread.

The sites are only able to display this data because the South Korean government took an unusual and controversial step: to release the precise hour-by-hour movements of people who had been infected with the virus.

A South Korean health official told Reuters that "we experienced a public backlash after a mass infection took place during the MERS outbreak five years ago, because we didn't make public where those patients had gone."

The database is technically anonymised, meaning no names are attached to its contents, but privacy experts told The Telegraph that the amount of information included in the database could easily lead to people's real identities being exposed.

The public release of the data is discouraging some people from leaving their homes.

Why risk heading out for a coffee when your precise movements could later be broadcast to the world if you're infected?

Dr Oli Buckley from the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia, said: "It feels like [the websites] are relying on social conformity in that people dread being the cause of another data point on the map."

"There's potentially a sense of shame associated with being 'exposed' as infected and rightly or wrongly that's driving behaviours."

The developer of the coronamap.live site, 19-year-old Ryan Jun-seo Hong, told Reuters that his project has grown to attract 300,000 visitors every day.

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Apps are mapping the spread of coronavirus in stunning detail - but they are spreading panic too

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For South Koreans worried about the spread of coronavirus, a new wave of unofficial websites has emerged to help them keep track of neighbours who have been infected.

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BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his license plate in nearby Wenzhou, which has had a spate of coronavirus cases despite being far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Stay indoors for two weeks, they requested.

After around 12 days, he was bored and went out early. This time, not only did the police contact him, so did his boss. He had been spotted near Hangzhou's West Lake by a camera with facial recognition technology, and the authorities had alerted his company as a warning.

"I was a bit shocked by the ability and efficiency of the mass surveillance network. They can basically trace our movements with the AI technology and big data at any time and any place," said the man, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions.

Chinese have long been aware that they are tracked by the world's most sophisticated system of electronic surveillance. The coronavirus emergency has brought some of that technology out of the shadows, providing the authorities with a justification for sweeping methods of high tech social control.

Artificial intelligence and security camera companies boast that their systems can scan the streets for people with even low-grade fevers, recognize their faces even if they are wearing masks and report them to the authorities.

If a coronavirus patient boards a train, the railway's "real name" system can provide a list of people sitting nearby.

Mobile phone apps can tell users if they have been on a flight or a train with a known coronavirus carrier, and maps can show them locations of buildings where infected patients live.

Although there has been some anonymous grumbling on social media, for now Chinese citizens seem to be accepting the extra intrusion, or even embracing it, as a means to combat the health emergency.

"In the circumstances, individuals are likely to consider this to be reasonable even if they are not specifically informed about it," said Carolyn Bigg, partner at law firm DLA Piper in Hong Kong.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Telecoms companies have long quietly tracked the movements of their users. China Mobile promoted this as a service this week, sending text messages to Beijing residents telling them they can check where they have been over the past 30 days. It did not explain why users might need this, but it could be useful if they are questioned by the authorities or their employers about their travel.

"In the era of big data and internet, the flow of each person can be clearly seen. So we are different from the SARS time now," epidemiologist Li Lanjuan said in an interview with China's state broadcaster CCTV last week, comparing the outbreak to a virus that killed 800 people in 2003.

"With such new technologies, we should make full use of them to find the source of infection and contain the source of infection."

The industry ministry sent a notice to China's AI companies and research institutes this week calling on them to help fight the outbreak. Companies have responded with a flurry of announcements touting the capabilities of their technology.

Facial recognition firm Megvii said on Tuesday it had developed a new way to spot and identify people with fevers, with support from the industry and science ministries. Its new "AI temperature measurement system", which detects temperature with thermal cameras and uses body and facial data to identify individuals, is already being tested in a Beijing district.

SenseTime, another leading AI firm, said it has built a similar system to be used at building entrances, which can identify people wearing masks, overcoming a weakness of earlier technology. Surveillance camera firm Zhejiang Dahua says it can detect fevers with infrared cameras to an accuracy within 0.3ºC.

In an interview with state news agency Xinhua, Zhu Jiansheng of the China Academy of Railway Sciences explained how technology can help the authorities find people who might be exposed to a confirmed or suspected coronavirus case on a train.

"We will retrieve relevant information about the passenger, including the train number, carriage number and information on passengers who were close to the person, such as people sitting three rows of seats before and after the person," he said.

"We will extract the information and then provide it to relevant epidemic prevention departments."

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Coronavirus brings China's surveillance state out of the shadows

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When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his license plate in nearby Wenzhou, which has had a spate of coronavirus cases despite being far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Stay indoors for two weeks, they requested.

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The coronavirus epidemic may be slowing in China after three months of crisis, but another problem is taking hold in the country: anxiety. Isolation and fear of being infected by the virus have given way to loneliness, especially among the residents of Wuhan, who are still under quarantine. A recent poll puts the number of people suffering from anxiety in China at 42 percent. Our correspondents Antoine Védeilhé, Charlie Wang and Charles Pellegrin report.
A programme prepared by Patrick Lovett.

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Focus - Anxiety, isolation, boredom: The side effects of coronavirus in China

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The coronavirus epidemic may be slowing in China after three months of crisis, but another problem is taking hold in the country: anxiety. Isolation and fear of being infected by the virus have given way to loneliness, especially among the residents of Wuhan, who are still under quarantine.

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As South Korea battles a snowballing number of Covid-19 cases, the government is letting people know if they were in the vicinity of a patient. But the volume of information has led to some awkward moments and now there is as much fear of social stigma as of illness, as Hyung Eun Kim of BBC News Korean reports.

As I sit at home, my phone beeps alarmingly with emergency alerts.

"A 43-year-old man, resident of Nowon district, tested positive for coronavirus," it says.

"He was at his work in Mapo district attending a sexual harassment class. He contracted the virus from the instructor of the class."

A series of alerts then chronicle where the men had been, including a bar in the area until 11:03 at night.

These alerts arrive all day, every day, telling you where an infected person has been - and when. You can also look up the information on the Ministry of Health and Welfare website.

No names or addresses are given, but some people are still managing to connect the dots and identify people. The public has even decided two of the infected were having an affair.

And, even if patients are not outright identified, they're facing judgement - or ridicule - online.

When you search online for a virus patient's case number, related queries include "personal details", "face", "photo", "family" - or even "adultery".

Some online users are commenting that "I had no idea so many people go to love motels" - the by-the-hour hotels popular with couples.

They are also joking that people cheating on their spouses are known to be keeping a low profile these days.

One recent alert concerned a woman, aged 27, who works at the Samsung plant in Gumi. It said that at 11:30 at night on 18 February she visited her friend, who had attended the gathering of religious sect Shincheonji, the single biggest source of infections in the country.

City mayor Jang Se-yong further revealed her surname on Facebook. Panicked Gumi residents commented on his post: "Tell us the name of her apartment building."

"Please do not spread my personal information," the woman later wrote on Facebook.

"I am so sorry for my family and friends who would get hurt, and it's too hard for me psychologically, more than (physical pain)."

South Korean laws on managing and publicly sharing information on patients of infectious diseases changed significantly after the Mers outbreak in 2015.

South Korea had the second-largest number of Mers cases after Saudi Arabia. At the time, the government was criticised for withholding information, such as where the patients had been.

After that, the laws were amended to empower investigators.

"We know that it is [in the] the territory of important personal data," Goh Jae-young, an official at the Korea Centers for Disease Control Prevention, told BBC Korean.

"At first we interview the patients and try to gather information, emphasising that this affects the health and safety of the entire people.

"Then to fill in the areas they perhaps haven't told us, and also to verify, we use GPS data, surveillance camera footage, and credit card transactions to recreate their route a day before their symptoms showed."

Mr Goh emphasises that they do not reveal every place a patient has been.

"We share with the public only places where there was close contact or infections could have spread - like where there are many people, where the patient was known to have not worn a mask."

Sometimes they have to reveal the name of specific store, too - which leads to closure for certain time and financial loss to the business owner.

South Korea has had more than 5,000 confirmed case of Covid-19 and more than 30 deaths.

But with most cases not leading to serious health problems, South Koreans now dread stigma as much as they fear the virus itself.

A research team at Seoul National University's Graduate School of Public Health recently asked 1,000 Koreans which scares them the most:

1. Potential carriers around them

2. Criticisms and further damage they may suffer from being infected

3. That they may not have symptoms yet have the virus

Prof You Myoung-soon's team found "criticisms and further damage" were more feared than having the virus.

A man who contracted the virus along with his mother, wife and two children wrote an emotional, lengthy post on Facebook asking people to stop blaming them.

"I didn't know my mother was a follower of Shincheonji [church]," he wrote. He went on to defend his wife, a nurse, who had been criticised for visiting so many places during her incubation period.

The husband said her job was to accompany people with physical disabilities to clinics for appointments, and she had no idea she had the virus.

"It is true my wife moved around a lot, but please stop cursing her. Her only fault is marrying someone like me, and having to work and take care of the children."

What do I need to know about the coronavirus?

Doctors warn that online pursuit of patients could have very serious consequences. Malicious comments online have long been a problem in South Korea, and in some cases have led to suicide.

Lee Su-young, a psychiatrist at Myongji Hospital in Goyang, Gyeonggi, told BBC Korean that some of her patients "were more afraid of being blamed than dying of the virus".

"Many have told me repeatedly 'someone I know got infected because of me,' [or] 'the person is quarantined because of me.'"

It was at Myongji Hospital that the two people accused of being in adulterous relationship were treated. One is known to have high levels of anxiety and suffered sleep deprivation due to online comments.

As the virus spreads rapidly, it's vital that the public are giving the information they need to protect themselves and others.

But Dr Lee says the public needs to remain mature with this information - otherwise "people who fear being judged will hide and this will put everyone in further danger".

Mr Goh, from the Korea Centers for Disease Control Prevention says this is the first time the government has given quite so much information about each individual affected.

''After the spread of virus ends," he says, "there has to be society's assessment whether or not this was effective and appropriate."

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'At a love motel': Are S Korea virus alerts too revealing?

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As South Korea battles a snowballing number of Covid-19 cases, the government is letting people know if they were in the vicinity of a patient. But the volume of information has led to some awkward moments and now there is as much fear of social stigma as of illness, as Hyung Eun Kim of BBC News Korean reports.

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코로나19 위협에 휩싸인 세계 각국이 한국을 주목한다. 어느나라보다 빠른 진단키트 검사와 드라이브스루 방식과 같은 창의적 검진에 놀라움을 표시했다. 민간이 내놓은 실시간 확진자 동선 앱과 이를 이용한 시민들의 자가 격리 모습에는 감탄을 금치 못한다.

./픽사베이 갈무리

16일 존스홉킨스 대학교가 공개한 실시간 코로나19 확산 지도 에 따르면 현재까지 세계 코로나19 확진자 수는 16만명을 넘어섰다. 중국(8만1003명)에서의 확산세가 여전히 높은 가운데 이탈리아(2만1157명)와 이란(1만3938명), 한국(8162명)이 그 뒤를 잇는다.

한국 코로나19 사망률은 0.7% 정도다. 세계보건기구(WHO)가 보고한 세계 평균(3.4%)보다 현저히 낮은 수치다. 세계 각국은 대만과 같은 초기 방역 대처 성공 방식과 아울러 한국이 행한 신속한 진단과 데이터의 빠른 공개를 눈여겨보기 시작했다.

로이터와 CNN등 외신은 한국 방역 대책뿐 아니라 확진자 동선을 알리는 앱이 다른 나라에 좋은 롤모델이라고 강조한다. 중국과 이탈리아가 코로나19 집중 지역에 적색경보를 내렸다면, 한국은 바이러스 검사를 전방위로 확대했을뿐 아니라 기술을 활용해 확진자 이동동선을 파악하는 등 민간 차원에서 조기에 잘 대처한다는 는 평가다.

실제 우리나라는 확진자 동선을 공개하면서 코로나19 대처에 대중의 참여를 제대로 이끌었다. 코로나 확진자 이동동선 앱은 코로나알리미와 코로나맵, 코로나나우, 코백, 신천지위치알림 등이다.

월스트릿저널(WSJ)이 우리나라를 "유독 두드러진다(stand out)"고 평가한 이유다. WSJ은 "중국 등 다른 아시아 국가도 확진자와 사망자 동선을 추적하지만 한국이 국민에게 공개하는 정보는 세밀하다"고 평가했다.
스마트폰, 통신망, 신용카드 3박자
한국이 기술을 활용해 코로나19에 제대로 대처할 수 있는 이유는 크게 높은 ▲스마트폰 보급률 ▲이동통신망 인프라 ▲신용카드 사용률 등 세 가지가 꼽힌다. 역학조사관은 신용카드 사용내역을 분석하고 스마트폰 위치정보 등을 활용해 확진자 동선을 더욱 빨리 파악할 수 있다.

스마트폰 사용률이 높은만큼 관련 앱 접근성이 좋고, 높은 수준의 이동통신망 덕에 실시간 정보 확인이 가능하다. 실제 한국 스마트폰 보급률은 세계 최고 수준이다.

미국 시장조사기관 퓨 리서치(Pew Research)가 세계 27개 국가를 대상으로 스마트폰 보급률을 조사한 결과 한국 보급률은 95%로 나타났다. 이는 주요 선진국 중간값인 76%보다 20%포인트쯤 높은 수치다. 한국의 뒤를 따른 국가는 이스라엘과 네덜란드, 스웨덴, 호주, 미국 등이다. 이들은 모두 80%대를 기록했다.

높은 수준의 이동통신망 인프라도 한 몫 거든다. 한국은 5세대(5G) 이동통신 서비스를 세계 첫 상용화했다. 관련 인프라 수준도 가장 앞선다. 인프라가 취약한 일부 국가에서 위치 정보를 얻기 힘들지만 우리나라에서는 언제 어디서든 제약없이 실시간 정보를 확인할 수 있다.

신용카드 사용률도 조기 대처가 가능한 주요 이유 중 하나다. 한국은행이 3월 5일 발표한 '2019년중 지급결제동향' 자료에 따르면 2019년 신용·체크카드 사용률은 전년 대비 5.8% 증가한 914조원을 기록했다. 일평균 2조5000억원이다.

코로나 19 확진자의 개별 이동 경로를 상세히 알려주는 앱과 웹사이트는 해외에서 전무하다. WHO 브리핑 내용을 따라 확진자 현황과 발생지역 등을 업데이트하는 앱은 많지만, 우리나라처럼 확진자별 동선을 파악하는 앱은 없다.

북미는 뉴스에 의존하는 경향이 강하다. 미국 캘리포니아주에 거주하는 김모씨는 "휴대폰에 의존하는 문화가 아니라서 그런지, 확진자 동선 관련 정보를 파악할 수 있는 앱은 알려지지 않았다"며 "확진자 수와 특정 분포도 소식도 대중매체를 통해 확인한다"고 말했다.

김 씨는 미국 CNN이 운영하는 를 주로 활용한다. 2월 29일(현지시간) 시작한 이 팟캐스트는 코로나바이러스 소개, 마스크 종류, 미국 질병통제예방센터(CDC)에서 바라보는 코로나바이러스 등 정보를 다룬다. 확진자 동선은 내용에 없다.

미국만이 아니다. 유럽 역시 확진자 상세 동선 공개는 없다. 스위스에 거주하는 박 모씨는 "유럽은 확진자별 이동 경로를 공개하지 않는다"며 "같은 회사 내 사람이 확진됐을 경우 조직 내에는 공유하지만 정부 차원에서 확진자 수와 사망자 정보, 어느 지역 거주자 인지 정도만 공개한다"고 설명했다.

한국 정부가 확진자 상세 이동 경로를 공개하는 이유는 주민의 알 권리 때문이다. 추가 감염 위험으로부터 비감염된 주민을 보호하기 위해 동선을 투명하게 알린다는 의미다.

감염 예방이나 확산에 큰 효과를 거둔다는 점에서 동선 공개를 지지하는 여론도 있지만 사생활 노출과 개인정보보호 문제를 이유로 우려의 목소리를 내기도 한다. 실제 국내에서는 확진자 방문 장소 공개 후 온라인 커뮤니티 등을 중심으로 개인정보가 유출돼 심각한 문제라는 지적이 나온다.

WSJ은 "한국의 투명한 정보 공개 방침은 확진자 증가세를 완화하고 공포감을 줄이는 데 긍정적인 효과를 발휘한다"면서도 "특히 서방 국가는 사생활 침해를 이유로 동선 공개가 불가능할 것"이라고 밝혔다.

국내 전문가들은 해외라고 확진자 동선 공개가 불가능한 것은 아니라고 분석했다. 이인호 중앙대 법학전문대학원 교수는 "미국과 유럽도 확진자 동선을 공개할 수는 있다"며 "이들 국가의 개인정보보호법이 두텁게 보이지만, 우리나라보다 법이 유연해 공익 목적이 분명하다면 공개가 가능하다"고 말했다.

익명을 요구한 국내 로펌 변호사 역시 "미국, 유럽 등 어느 곳이나 개인정보 보호에 예외 규정을 둔다"며 "공익을 위한 목적이면 확진자 동선 공개가 가능하다"고 말했다. 이어 "법적 문제보다는 위치 정보 등 데이터를 얻기 힘들어서 그럴 수 있다"며 "확진자 정보를 어떤 방식으로 얼만큼 공개할지는 국가마다 차이가 있을 것이다"라고 덧붙였다.

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세계가 놀란 확진자 동선 추적 '통신과 금융 인프라' 덕분

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코로나19 위협에 휩싸인 세계 각국이 한국을 주목한다. 어느나라보다 빠른 진단키트 검사와 드라이브스루 방식과 같은 창의적 검진에 놀라움을 표시했다. 민간이 내놓은 실시간 확진자 동선 앱과 이를 이용한 시민들의 자가 격리 모습에는 감탄을 금치 못한다. 16일 존스홉킨스 대학교가 공개한 실시간 코로나19 확산 지도 에 따르면 현재까지 세계 코로나19 확진자 수는 16만명을 넘어섰다.

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In the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, where millions have been under lockdown for the last two months, Hubei residents have been coping with uncertainty, anxiety and stress.

As the virus spreads around the world, people living in the province spoke to the Guardian about how they coped with prolonged confinement, isolation and panic, and the strategies they used to protect their mental health.

Guo Jing, 29, Wuhan: 'Make yourself a point of connection'

At the beginning, the decision to close the city was so sudden that everyone was at a loss. I only knew about it the next morning. There was no time to react, no option to leave. I was panicked and at a loss. I didn't know when the lockdown would end, so went out to buy vegetables and see how the food supply was, which alleviated my anxiety to some extent.

Every day, I have tried to get up and exercise, cook and eat, write a diary and do some volunteer work. Taking action and doing things makes you feel better.

Everyone has been worrying and I have been restricting the time spent outside. I am isolated here. But human beings are social. So I have been going out every day to interview sanitation workers. I have asked them about their problems and working conditions. This connection has been very real. Talking online to friends has also been a kind of mutual support.

There was also a sense of anxiety from not knowing when it would end. I have looked at the numbers every day.

It has also been very difficult to be locked in the community. It deprives you of some sense of control. Food has been bought by the residential community. I can't even control what I want to buy. It feels like I have had to rely on other people to live.

By writing a diary online, I have connected with other people. People have sent masks to me that I have donated to sanitation workers or to a hospital. [I recommend] making yourself a point of connection and forming a network to serve the needs of different groups.

It is very important to rebuild your daily life, to maintain social connection, to connect with friends and the people around you. If you can participate in some volunteer work this can alleviate the sense of powerlessness in the face of a huge disaster. Caring for others, seeing their needs and doing what you can to help, is also a way of helping yourself.

'American coronavirus': China pushes propaganda casting doubt on virus origin

Chatting with my friends we have all commented on what a luxury it is to talk every day. We have shared what we have done every day. Some people have started to exercise while others have started studying. Some people who normally don't like to go out are now going out every day. It has felt precious.

Werther Huang, 22, Wuhan: 'Ask for help'

It's hard to describe. Never-ending anxiety and heart palpitations. Most recently, I haven't been able to concentrate on my work. I don't absorb what I'm reading. I'm constantly looking at Weibo to see the latest developments. Really, it just makes things worse, but I can't help it.

I have tried to shift my attention. I have played games online with my friends. When I need to work, I have used the time-management app, Forest. But when I look at the news again, all this effort is for nothing.

If you feel stressed, you can communicate with your relatives and friends, or ask a psychologist for help. Take advantage of this time to care for yourself and your family.

Shen Miao, 30, Tianmen city, Hubei province: 'I write every day'

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A man looks out of the window at a residential compound in Wuhan. Photograph: REUTERS/Reuters

I came home from Wuhan the day before the lockdown. Like most people, I didn't know before that the epidemic was so serious. So when I went home, I was very worried I had been infected and afraid I would infect my family.

I sprayed alcohol all over my body. I consciously kept a distance with my family. After half a month of self isolation, nothing happened. Finally, the stone hanging in my heart was lifted.

Seeing the messages online of people begging for help and unable to find a hospital bed was really hard for me. I felt like I couldn't help. If I was in Wuhan maybe there would have been something I could have done. The more [messages] I saw, the guiltier I felt. As much as I could, I tried to forward on people's requests for help online. Reading the news and these posts, I felt despair and like my heart could not bear that much.

I feel like I am a survivor. It's a privilege to be healthy. I have read books, watched plays and movies. I have watched the news. I started writing a "lock down" diary, and plan to write until the end of the lockdown. I have written every day. Sometimes I just have just posted a picture. Several of my posts have been deleted but it has helped me. It has provided a channel for me to express emotions. Seeing other people reply has let me know that I am not alone. Everyone is in this situation. I am not special.

Hu, 22 Huanggang city, Hubei: 'Talking with friends is really important'

I have documented what was happening through conversations with people or by going out. I have also volunteered in the hospitals. This has kept me busy, and allowed me to relax while also helping some of the rescue efforts. It has helped relieve some of the mental and emotional pressure.

Talking with friends is also really important. On the night of 6 February [when the Chinese doctor and whistleblower Li Wenliang died], I spent all night reading the news on Weibo and WeChat. Like me, my friends didn't sleep. Every update someone saw, they would immediately share.

This was the hardest time for me. There's no way to really deal with this except to remember it. Also, in late January when the outbreak first exploded ... seeing all the messages online of people asking for help and the huge gap between what was being reported in the news and what was really happening also caused a lot of mental pressure.
Additional reporting by Lillian Yang Topics

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Write a diary, take action: Hubei residents on fighting coronavirus anxiety

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In the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, where millions have been under lockdown for the last two months, Hubei residents have been coping with uncertainty, anxiety and stress. As the virus spreads around the world, people living in the province spoke to the Guardian about how they coped with prolonged confinement, isolation and panic, and the strategies they used to protect their mental health.

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Coronavirus gives China reason to increase its citizen surveillance-for now

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Improved facial recognition tech and mandatory registrations track potential coronavirus carriers.

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As China battles the novel coronavirus, the country may have a mental health crisis on its hands caused by the disease.

A Chinese Psychology Society survey found that 42.6% of Chinese citizens tested positive for having anxiety related to the epidemic.

Despite efforts by the Chinese government to battle the inevitable hysteria around the pandemic, the country may not be equipped to handle a mental health crisis.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As China's healthcare system strains to battle the coronavirus epidemic, the country may have yet another health crisis on its hands: deteriorating mental health.

A recent Chinese Psychology Society survey found that 42.6% of 18,000 Chinese citizens tested positive for having anxiety related to the coronavirus epidemic, Reuters reported. Of 14,000 evaluated for depression, researchers discovered that 16.6% of individuals may be dealing with moderate to severe depression.

On Chinese social media platform Weibo, a hashtag that translates to #howtodealwithfeelingveryanxiousathome was trending with more than 290 million views, NBC News reported.

Empty grocery store shelves, streets that look like ghost towns, overflowing hospitals, and millions sequestered at home paint a picture of at least 16 cities quarantined near the center of the outbreak.

Those who do dare to venture outside their homes could be faced with mandatory temperature checks and sprayed with disinfectant before entering buildings. Misinformation is also stoking fears about the spread of the coronavirus online.

Although the transportation bans, strict quarantine measures, and lockdowns were implemented by the Chinese government in hopes of curbing the spread of the disease, it has left Chinese citizens afraid and anxious to leave their homes.

Zheng Nanru, a Chinese college student that has been stuck in her hometown of Wuhan told NBC News that Wuhan has been quiet since the city went on lockdown on January 23.

"People aren't really coming out. I rarely see people walking outside in the compound," Zheng told NBC News. "If we do have to go out, when we come back to the compound, the security guards will spray us with disinfectant from head to toe before we enter."

The anxiety is even more acute for those at the center of the coronavirus outbreak, who have been on lockdown for weeks on end.

"For a lot of people, a day or two in isolation may be OK, but weeks without getting out of the house - the stress will certainly build-up," Paul Yin, a psychologist who is helping insurance companies spread information on how to cope mentally with the outbreak, told NBC News. "Every day you are being reminded that life is not normal, constantly, you can't escape - you can't pretend that it's not there."

In the wake of the outbreak, China's National Health Commission has deployed a variety of mental health services to battle the hysteria caused by the disease, which is now known as COVID-19.

The government agency provided guidelines for local authorities to promote psychological crisis intervention and started telephone- and online-based counseling services. In-person counseling sessions are difficult due to quarantine measures, according to a state media agency.

Psychological support groups have been set up on QQ, a popular social media platform, by Chinese universities. A public account on WeChat called KnowYourself opened a green channel for frontline healthcare workers, patients and family members with members of its psychological team chatting with individuals to help reduce panic attacks.

Meanwhile, at least 300 24-hour mental health support hotlines run by university psychology departments, counseling services, and NGOs have been launched since the outbreak.

The hotlines have been inundated with calls from frightened and anxious Chinese citizens who are hunkered down in their homes and afraid of catching the disease.

"They leave messages saying they're exhausted, that they're scared," Cui Erjing, a Seattle-based volunteer for one of the hotlines, told Reuters. "The doctors don't know if they're going to get infected or if their co-workers or going to get infected, and they don't know how bad it's spreading."

One Shanghai-based psychologist told Reuters that one caller who lived with chronic depression reported suicidal thoughts due to the "barrage of bad news."

The novel coronavirus has swept the globe infecting more than 79,000, igniting mass hysteria in its wake. As of February 24, the death toll reached 2,626 with all but 33 deaths reported in mainland China. Despite the various measures deployed by the Chinese government, the country may not be equipped to battle the psychological fallout of the coronavirus, where mental health continues to be shrouded in stigma and is largely taboo.

According to World Health Organization data, China had only 2.2 psychiatrists available for every 100,000 people country which has just 2.2 psychiatrists available for every 100,000 people. The country's mental health services are seriously lacking with only 122,309 mental health professionals to serve a population of 1.386 billion.

Volunteers have even offered to step in to help to counsel anxiety-ridden citizens, but mental health professionals worry they may do more harm than good without the proper training, according to Reuters.

In addition to lacking mental health services, stigmas around mental health prevent Chinese citizens from seeking help. A 2016 study found that less than 6% of people with anxiety and depression, substance use disorders, dementia, and epilepsy sought out treatment, the Guardian reported.

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Isolated and sequestered in their homes, Chinese citizens report anxiety and depression while on lockdown amid the coronavirus outbreak

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As China battles the novel coronavirus, the country may have a mental health crisis on its hands caused by the disease. A Chinese Psychology Society survey found that 42.6% of Chinese citizens tested positive for having anxiety related to the epidemic.

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The color codes, checkpoints, and phone searches all smack of policies carried out in Xinjiang. People in China's east aren't used to it, and there was plenty of grumbling in Hangzhou. Subway guards told us passengers, usually older, sometimes cursed and yelled at them.

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The color codes, checkpoints, and phone searches all smack of policies carried out in Xinjiang. People in China's east aren't used to it, and there was plenty of grumbling in Hangzhou. Subway guards told us passengers, usually older, sometimes cursed and yelled at them. https://t.co/WHgcLjZCI0

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Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck. https://t.co/rettbnhbWW

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The color codes, checkpoints, and phone searches all smack of policies carried out in Xinjiang. People in China's east aren't used to it, and there was plenty of grumbling in Hangzhou. Subway guards told us passengers, usually older, sometimes cursed and yelled at them. pic.twitter.com/WHgcLjZCI0
— Paul Mozur 孟建國 (@paulmozur) March 2, 2020

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The color codes, checkpoints, and phone searches all smack of policies carried out in Xinjiang. People in China's east aren't used to it, and there was plenty of grumbling in Hangzhou. Subway guards told us passengers, usually older, sometimes cursed and yelled at them. https://t.co/WHgcLjZCI0

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Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck. https://t.co/rettbnhbWW

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The color codes, checkpoints, and phone searches all smack of policies carried out in Xinjiang. People in China's east aren't used to it, and there was plenty of grumbling in Hangzhou. Subway guards told us passengers, usually older, sometimes cursed and yelled at them. https://t.co/WHgcLjZCI0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
The color codes, checkpoints, and phone searches all smack of policies carried out in Xinjiang. People in China's east aren't used to it, and there was plenty of grumbling in Hangzhou. Subway guards told us passengers, usually older, sometimes cursed and yelled at them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck. https://t.co/rettbnhbWW

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The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic caused a mental health crisis as it swept through China and governments elsewhere must prepare to address similar problems at it strikes them, researchers have warned.

Fear caused by the new germ's deadliness, a strict quarantine, mistrust of officials who mishandled the outbreak and a wave of social media misinformation all took their toll on mental health.

During the outbreak, "generalised fear and fear-induced overreactive behaviour were common among the public", while depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder all emerged.

The result was "a heightened public mental health crisis", according to a paper in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by the US government's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The research was published as a new survey showed two-thirds of Britons were struggling to stay positive about the future in the face of the epidemic.

"As the virus spreads globally, governments must address public mental health needs by developing and implementing well-coordinated strategic plans to meet these needs during the Covid-19 pandemic," said the authors.

The origin of the coronavirus is believed to have been a "wet market" in the Chinese city of Wuhan which sold both dead and live animals including fish and birds. The first cases were reported at the end of 2019.

The researchers, from the Rand corporation think tank, said several unique characteristics of the outbreak and how it was handled led to the mental health crisis.

Firstly many Chinese people still remembered the SARS outbreak and the effect it had on daily life and the economy. Covid-19 is more infectious than SARS and more deadly than normal flu.

The uncertain incubation period and doubt over whether those without symptoms could still spread it added to anxiety. The Chinese government's initial downplaying of the outbreak's severity then eroded trust in its response.

Meanwhile the large-scale quarantine measures in major cities, which confined residents to their homes, added to mental pressure.

Reports of shortages of medical protective supplies, medical staff, and hospital beds in Wuhan also caused enormous concern.

The researchers said that lastly information overload through social media, including misinformation, "posed a major risk to public mental health during this health crisis".

China recognised the need to support people's mental health during the crisis, but the researchers said efforts had probably been dented by a severe lack of specialist staff.

Meanwhile, an Ipsos-MORI poll found 62 per cent of Britons surveyed said they found it harder to stay positive about the future since the outbreak, while 55 per cent found it harder to stay positive day-to-day. The gloomy outlook was most pronounced in younger generations and women.

Kelly Beaver, managing director of Ipsos MORI public affairs, said: "In the last fortnight we have all been thrown into an unfamiliar and daunting world. Therefore, it isn't entirely surprising that two thirds of Britons are reporting that it is harder to stay positive about the future and over half of us find it a struggle to stay positive day-to-day."

​Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security

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The Covid-19 mental health crisis: expect depression, anxiety and stress disorders, researchers warn

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The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic caused a mental health crisis as it swept through China and governments elsewhere must prepare to address similar problems at it strikes them, researchers have warned. Fear caused by the new germ's deadliness, a strict quarantine, mistrust of officials who mishandled the outbreak and a wave of social media misinformation all took their toll on mental health.

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"most countries who have set up surveillance systems in the past have rarely taken them down after their initial purpose has ceased to be an issue, with the US and China being the best examples."

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As the global coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is leaving its mark across the world, at least four governments are deploying or at looking at implementing privacy-intrusive surveillance systems to track citizens and the disease's spread.

Countries like China and South Korea have already deployed extensive citizen tracking systems, while Israel and the US are preparing similar surveillance measures.

China

Of all, China leads all countries when it comes to the tracking measures it has currently in use and aimed at dealing with the coronavirus outbreak. Many had been in place for years, such as the Great Firewall, or its ubiquitous street surveillance system. Others, like the Health Code color system and the Hong Kong tracking bracelets, have been stitched together just for the COVID-19 outbreak.

All these systems have been at full throttle ever since the start of the year. Beijing's giant army of censors has used its complete and unhindered control over the Chinese internet and its tech companies to command the local and external narrative surrounding the disease -- although with some mixed results.

In the pandemic's initial stages, censors removed any mentions of an outbreak. Later, as the problem couldn't be ignored, censors started removing all posts or images that critiqued the central government for its late reply in recognizing and dealing with the crisis.

But the biggest role in the Chinese state's surveillance apparatus was played by its almost universal street camera system. First deployed following the Beijing 2008 Olympics, this system has been expanded all over the country's main metropolitan areas and has even been recently upgraded with facial recognition capabilities.

Chinese authorities have been using this system to catch, shame, and fine citizens going outside without face masks and even used it to identify and quarantine individuals who showed symptoms.

But the Chinese government has also been investing in new systems. For example, the local government has introduced a new scheme called Health Code, which, according to the Guardian, is currently being deployed in over 100 cities.

Chinese citizens can sign up for a Health Code account using their Alipay or WeChat profiles. Once they have a Health Code account, they will be assigned a color code -- red for infected, yellow for quarantined, and green for healthy.

The system allegedly works by taking a user's Alipay or WeChat account history and mapping their travel history. It then weighs other factors like the time spent in outbreak hotspots and if the user had contact with other citizens deemed potential carriers of the virus, and then assigns a health color code.

The system leverages the vasts quantities of mobile data and geo-location points Chinese tech companies have been collecting to map infection hotspots and then triage China's population based on their previous interactions.

But if this system seems intrusive, Chinese authorities are taking it one step further in Hong Kong, where they have been using wristbands to track infected locals.

According to a Fortune report, all persons infected or quarantined in their homes were assigned a wristband they had to wear at all times. An older version of this wristband worked paired with a user's smartphone. If the user left his home (quarantine), turned off his phone, removed the bracelet, or the bracelet owner moved too far from his phone, an app on the device would alert the Department of Health, who'd issue a major fine in the owner's name.

The system apparently worked very well, because it received an upgrade this week. According to reports, a new version of the bracelet comes with a built-in GPS tracker to keep tabs on locals wherever they are. Furthermore, the program has been expanded to all travelers as well. If the traveler ventures into an infection hotspot, or has contact with a quarantined or infected local, then the traveler is placed under quarantine as well, all with the data received from the bracelet.

South Korea

A similarly broad surveillance mechanism was also leveraged in South Korea. According to a report, the Seoul government has heavily relied on CCTV footage, bank card records, and mobile phone data to deal with the outbreak, with extremely good results.

Per reports, the government combined the three data sources to re-trace the steps of all initially infected citizens and then test all the persons they came in contact, aggressively cracking down on infection hotspots before they exploded to envelop the entire country.

Israel

The Israeli government, which is currently dealing with the early stages of a COVID-19 outbreak, is now working to employ a similar system to the one used in South Korea.

According to Haaretz, the Israeli government passed this week an emergency law that would grant police and the Shin Bet security service access to the entire country's cellphone location data.

Local authorities say they plan to use this information in the same way to South Korea and track down the persons that had contact with known infected hosts, and then notify them via SMS about the next steps they must take.

The Tel-Aviv government also plans to use this cellphone surveillance system to make sure infected users do not leave their quarantine.

The government's decision has not been welcomed with warmth by the Israeli population, though. Many are now fearing that the government may never give up the power it has now granted itself -- the power to track every citizen's location in real-time.

The US

And discussions on a similar measure are currently also underway in Washington. According to the Washington Post, the White House held meetings last week with Google, Facebook, and several telcos on the topic.

Per reports, the Trump administration wants to know if there a way through which it could gain access to the cellphone location data of all Americans in order to track the spread of COVID-19.

However, things are moving slower in the US, where the White House fears the immense pushback to any Israel-like emergency law, pushback that would come from all sides, such as privacy groups, political rivals, the general public, and the tech companies and telcos themselves.

As some privacy groups and news outlets have already pointed out this week, most countries who have set up surveillance systems in the past have rarely taken them down after their initial purpose has ceased to be an issue, with the US and China being the best examples.

So far, technology has failed to play a role in preventing the coronavirus pandemic, and the virus may end up helping some unscrupulous governments set up surveillance systems that will live years after the current outbreak has died down.

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US, Israel, South Korea, and China look at intrusive surveillance solutions for tracking COVID-19 | ZDNet

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As the global coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is leaving its mark across the world, at least four governments are deploying or at looking at implementing privacy-intrusive surveillance systems to track citizens and the disease's spread. Countries like China and South Korea have already deployed extensive citizen tracking systems, while Israel and the US are preparing similar surveillance measures.

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AI firms deploy fever detection systems in Beijing to fight outbreak

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National AI champions Megvii and Baidu have initially rolled out advanced AI-powered temperature screening systems in major Beijing railway stations, as the country's capital steps up efforts against the coronavirus outbreak.

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In Beijing, China, subway passengers are being screen en masse for symptoms of coronavirus by artificial technology and temperature scanners.

Two Chinese tech companies have rolled out AI and infrared-scanning devices in the city.

Beijing officials hope to control the spread of the virus as millions return to work after the Lunar New year holiday.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

In Beijing, China, subway passengers are being screened en masse for symptoms of coronavirus - but not by health authorities.

Instead, artificial intelligence is in charge.

The measures, implemented last week in several locations, came just days after the Beijing government started using infrared-imaging temperature scanners and handheld thermometers in all city subway stations.

Two Chinese AI giants, Megvii and Baidu, are behind the AI and temperature-scanning developments. They have implemented scanners to detect body temperature and send alerts to company workers if a person's body temperature is high enough to constitute a fever.

'Body detection, face detection, and infrared cameras'

In early February, Megvii initiated pilot programs in the Mudanyuan subway station, not far from the elite Peking University, and a nearby government administration building.

And days prior, Baidu rolled out temperature-scanners at a single subway station in the city.

Megvii and Baidu's roll-outs came shortly after the Beijing government established temperature-monitoring measures in all of the city's subway stations.

Megvii's AI system, which monitors as many as 16 checkpoints in a single station, can detect body temperatures for up to 15 people per second and at a distance of up to 16 feet.

According to a company representative, the system operates almost completely autonomously, requiring just one worker to monitor the technology.

The system "integrates body detection, face detection, and dual-sensing via infrared cameras and visible light," Megvii said in a statement.

"The system can accurately detect and flag high body temperature even when people are wearing masks, hats, or cover[ing] their faces with other items," the company added.

Baidu, one of the largest search-engine companies in China, screens subway passengers at the Qinghe station with infrared scanners. But it also uses a facial-recognition system, taking photographs of passengers' faces.

If the Baidu system detects a body temperature of at least 99 degrees Fahrenheit, it sends an alert to the staff member for another screening. The technology can scan the temperatures of more than 200 people per minute.

Megvii's system also sends alerts to an on-site staff member.

Beijing is pressing to implement widespread temperature-tracking technology as millions of people return to work after the Lunar New Year holiday, hoping to control the spread of coronavirus.

The latest corporate- and state-surveillance developments have prompted concerns from some, including the Council on Foreign Relations, a centrist think-tank in Washington, DC.

"The [coronavirus] epidemic has given the Chinese government an argument for acquiring and monitoring private-sector data. This has tied tech companies closer to the state and led to an increase in surveillance in the name of public health," according to two researchers with the organization.

China's National Health Commission (NHC) recently told local governments to "use big data technology to track, screen priority [cases], and effectively forecast the development of the epidemic in real-time," Japan Times reported.

"Strengthen the information link between ... public security and transportation, and other departments," the NHC statement added.

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Chinese subways are using artificial intelligence facial recognition scanners to help detect whether people have coronavirus

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In Beijing, China, subway passengers are being screen en masse for symptoms of coronavirus by artificial technology and temperature scanners. Two Chinese tech companies have rolled out AI and infrared-scanning devices in the city. Beijing officials hope to control the spread of the virus as millions return to work after the Lunar New year holiday.

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The Chinese government is reportedly telling citizens to use a mobile app that tells them if they will be quarantined for the novel coronavirus.

The app uses a color code, according to The New York Times - green means people can travel freely, while a yellow or red indicates they must report to authorities.

E-commerce giant Alibaba and its sister company Ant Financial run the app, which also reportedly sends people's information and location to police.

The app represents an unprecedented use of consumer smartphone technology by a nation-state to respond to a public health crisis - and privacy advocates worry it's giving the Chinese government an excuse to harvest more citizen data.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese citizens are reportedly being required to use a smartphone app that tells them whether they should carry on as usual - or report to a medical facility to be quarantined.

The service, called Health Code, is being run by the Chinese government using a platform owned by Ant Financial, sister company to the $500 billion-dollar e-commerce giant Alibaba, according to The New York Times. People can sign up through the Alipay wallet app. Tencent, the Chinese tech giant that owns WeChat, has also reportedly partnered with the government to host a similar health code system on its app.

People using the health code are assigned a QR code along with a color ranking - green means the user is free to travel, while yellow or red means they must be quarantined. The code is based in part on people's answers to an in-app questionnaire, but little else is known about how people are classified, leading to confusion and fear among those who receive a red code, according to Reuters.

The app also is raising concerns among privacy advocates. The app reportedly sends users' location and personal information to police as soon as they begin using it, and an official law enforcement social media account said police were a partner in developing the app. Chinese authorities said the data collected will only be used for the coronavirus outbreak, after which it will be destroyed.

More than a billion people use Tencent's apps in China, while over 900 million Chinese citizens use Alipay. Over 700 million people have started using Tencent's health code service, according to the company.

In a statement to Business Insider, Ant Financial general counsel Leiming Chen said that governments and private companies working together to address a pandemic is a "global common practice."

"We believe digital technology can and should play an active role in helping contain the global spread of the COVID-19 outbreak. Ant Financial requires that all third-party developers, including those who offer health code services using our technology platform, strictly adhere to our data security and privacy requirements, which include obtaining user consent before providing services," Chen said.

A representative for Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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China is reportedly making people download an Alibaba-backed app that decides whether they'll be quarantined for coronavirus

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The Chinese government is reportedly telling citizens to use a mobile app that tells them if they will be quarantined for the novel coronavirus. The app uses a color code, according to The New York Times - green means people can travel freely, while a yellow or red indicates they must report to authorities.

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China’s facial recognition technology now identifies people wearing masks amid the Covid-19 epidemi

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2020-02-10 18:05

Beijing - February 10, 2020 - SenseTime, a world-leading artificial intelligence (AI) company that specializes in computer vision and deep learning, is leveraging its technological expertise to fight the novel coronavirus outbreak. In addition to providing supercomputing resources to the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, SenseTime has also rolled out a series of AI-empowered solutions to help prevent and control the spread of the virus.

The 'Smart AI Epidemic Prevention Solutions' developed by SenseTime is a quick and effective system in screening and detecting individuals with fever in a crowd. The AI-powered solution can be deployed at building entrances and public spaces including airports, train and subway stations, as well as office buildings. The solution enables supporting staff to identify individuals with a fever - an indicating symptom of coronavirus infection -- without direct body contact, minimizing the risk of cross-infection.

SenseTime's SenseCare Smart Health Platform is already widely adopted by a number of hospitals. Using image processing technology, the platform assists doctors to analyze images of suspected pneumonia cases and assess the level of lung abnormalities, which improves the efficiency of diagnostic procedures. SenseTime is also supporting medical institutions and research labs to develop a treatment for the coronavirus by sharing its knowledge in AI technologies and research experience in pharmacology and gene analysis.

The life-threatening coronavirus infection has affected thousands of people. And in times of hardship, we would like to pay tribute to frontline medical staff who are working relentlessly to battle against the outbreak. We will explore all and any possible ways for AI to contribute towards fighting the virus, so SenseTime will continually push forward and develop AI technologies in hopes of building a better tomorrow.

In addition to the above, SenseTime offered its SenseStudy AI platform and online distance learning courses to necessary teachers and students for free, so that they can learn about programming and AI theories at home during the suspension of schools. SenseTime also debuted the first batch of 12-hour online courses that teaches some of the fundamental basics of artificial intelligence. The courses also allow teachers, who are keen to become AI instructors, to attend the instructor lessons and take verification tests online.

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2020-02-10 18:05 Beijing - February 10, 2020 - SenseTime, a world-leading artificial intelligence (AI) company that specializes in computer vision and deep learning, is leveraging its technological expertise to fight the novel coronavirus outbreak.

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China has launched an app that allows people to check whether they have been at risk of catching the coronavirus.

The 'close contact detector' tells users if they have been near a person who has been confirmed or suspected of having the virus.

People identified as being at risk are advised to stay at home and inform local health authorities.

The technology shines a light on the Chinese government's close surveillance of its population.

To make an inquiry users scan a Quick Response (QR) code on their smartphones using apps like the payment service Alipay or social media platform WeChat.

Once the new app is registered with a phone number, users are asked to enter their name and ID number. Every registered phone number can then be used to check the status of up to three ID numbers.

The app was jointly developed by government departments and the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation and supported by data from health and transport authorities, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua.

It is widely known that the Chinese government conducts high levels of surveillance on its citizens but experts in the field suggest, in this case at least, it will not be seen as controversial within the country.

Hong Kong-based technology lawyer at the law firm DLA Piper Carolyn Bigg told the BBC: "In China, and across Asia, data is not seen as something to be locked down, it's something that can be used. Provided it's done in a transparent way, with consent where needed."

"From a Chinese perspective this is a really useful service for people... It's a really powerful tool that really shows the power of data being used for good," she added.

The Chinese government defines 'close contact' as coming near to, with no effective protection, confirmed, suspected or mild cases of the coronavirus while the person was ill, even if they were showing no symptoms at the time.

'Close contact' covers:

People who work closely together, share a classroom, or live in the same home

Medical staff, family members or other people who have been in close contact with patients and their caregivers

Passengers and crew who have been on planes, trains and other forms of transport with an infected person

For example, all air passengers within three rows of an infected person, as well as cabin staff, are seen as being in close contact, while other passengers would be recorded as having general contact.

When it comes to air-conditioned trains, all passengers and crew members in the same carriage are regarded as being in close contact.

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China launches coronavirus 'close contact' app

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China has launched an app that allows people to check whether they have been at risk of catching the coronavirus. The 'close contact detector' tells users if they have been near a person who has been confirmed or suspected of having the virus.

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Epidemic boosts China's big data push but privacy still a concern

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China is scooping up more data amid the coronavirus outbreak, raising concerns about privacy though most willing to put public safety first until the crisis ends.

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"For all of China’s economic advancements in recent decades, the rudiments of connected life — capable smartphones, reliable internet — remain out of reach for large segments of the population. As the virus has turned online conveniences into daily necessities, these people, most of whom live in China’s rural hinterland, have been cut off from their regular lives"

"In China, many parents cannot afford to buy multiple devices for themselves and their children, even though many of the world’s cheapest smartphones — and most of the fanciest ones, too — are made in China. The nation is blanketed in 4G service, yet the signal is spotty in parts of the countryside. Home broadband can be expensive outside big cities."

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The Coronavirus Exposes Education's Digital Divide

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In China, many rural students lack the connections or hardware to learn remotely. More nations will confront the same reality as the outbreak spreads.

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Getty Images / STR / Contributor

Though restaurants have reopened, Wang Lan, who works for a Wuhan-based media company, hasn't eaten out since the city's 76-day lockdown was lifted on April 8. "People generally choose to get food delivered," she says. Back when the epidemic was at its worst, only one person from each family was allowed to leave the apartment compound, for a two-hour window, to buy groceries.

Wang worked from home for two months, returning to the office in April. Her company organised testing for the whole staff and implemented new rules. With more than 1,000 employees, before the outbreak you could go to the cafeteria buffet, but now lunch is packed for each person and employees go in shifts to collect their lunch, then eat it separately. Wang still avoids going to places with a lot of people and continues minimising time at the supermarket.

When she arrives or leaves her office, she scans her "health code" - accessible through Alipay and WeChat. Her code is green, meaning she is allowed to travel domestically. Those with yellow or red codes have to stay at home. The codes have become crucial to everyday life. She scans it to get onto public transport, to go to the supermarket, and to enter and leave her residential compound.

However, the name "health code" is somewhat misleading. The closest thing to the colour-coded health codes being used in China are immunity certificates Western countries are discussing. While a green code allows you to travel, it does not mean you are immune from coronavirus. It is a "probably not infected" pass for those that want to get back to work.

While local governments have each launched their own health code mini-programs, the interface is the same for the user. In essence, departments have integrated data on travel (from bus, train, and flight bookings), contact with known, suspected or confirmed cases, and self-reported symptoms to generate the traffic light colours - red, yellow or green - which indicates how high-risk the individual may be.

In Wuhan, it takes into account hospital-visit data. At the end of February, Li Jiaying's mother went to the hospital for a check-up, fearing she had the virus. Though a doctor found her virus-free, Li's mother found her health code went red soon after she returned home - probably because hospitals were high-risk areas for transmission. She had to stay inside for the next 14 days (during this time, codes of family members she was living with remained green).

Almost two months later, most people Li knows, herself included, have a green code. For inter-city travel, residents of Hubei reported that while a green code was enough to leave the province, they still had to undertake quarantine or testing once they arrived. They also obtained approval from the neighbourhood Party committee that managed the address to which they planned to move. Universities that have yet to open their doors have ordered students currently in Hubei not to come back until they give notice.

During the epidemic's peak, students started reporting their health status on platforms they usually used to check in for lectures. Li saw that her name was in red on her teacher's interface, a visual note for the university's Party secretary and counsellors to personally check on her health status, which she still submits digitally everyday.

When will lockdown end? The UK's lockdown rules, explained

Nationally, many employees self-reported their health status, answering single-choice questions on whether they had coronavirus symptoms, their current location, and whether they had been to, or had any contact with people from Hubei. That data was filed to local governments to establish which employees were allowed to return to their offices.

The anonymised location and movements of confirmed new cases continue to be posted on trackers embedded into popular apps such as Toutiao and Baidu. As Chinese nationals continue to return from outside the country, many of the latest updates are of new cases flying into airports who are sent straight into mandatory quarantine, which returnees have to pay for. The last few confirmed cases for Shanghai, at time of writing, were students returning from the UK.

A month or so before, these maps were more dynamic. Citizens could see just how far they were from confirmed cases, how many cases each district had, and whether people in their apartment buildings had been infected. They could also check whether they had taken transport with someone who tested positive.

Telecom providers have been involved in public health messaging. They have pushed lengthy SMS messages to Wuhan residents on how to troubleshoot problems with the health code. They have also sent advice signed off by the city's prevention and control department on mask-wearing, hand hygiene, and using contactless payments where possible. Local governments have tacitly admitted the system has teething problems by instituting channels for people to apply to have their colour changed to green, if they think they have been wrongly assigned yellow or red.

Coronavirus-related tech experiments in Europe are having their own issues. Researchers are torn over how to implement privacy protecting contact tracing. A report on one such app under development in Germany, found it could "only be installed on up-to-date Apple and Android phones, which will reduce its coverage to roughly 60-65 per cent of the general population," says Sven Herpig, director for international cybersecurity policy at Berlin-based thinktank SNV. People may not want to be part of these infrastructures, or not have the means to join. If apps don't work and scale, at some point we may have to decide to go non-digital.

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None of the apps rolled out in China are replacements for traditional epidemic-fighting strategies such as human-led contact tracing - identifying those who fall ill, finding those with whom they have recently been in contact, and quarantining them. Despite the attention given to the health code, the country's virus mitigation strategies are rooted in boots-on-the-ground management. Tech experiments have been layered over other epidemic-fighting infrastructure, so judging their utility is difficult. Often left out of the conversation is at what point tech applications become useful, and when they are no longer. "We don't have proof that any of it really worked," Herpig says.

China's health code is not the precise contact tracing that Apple and Google want to roll out. In fact, it is surprisingly low-tech. That its initial questionnaire includes whether you have had contact with people from Hubei shows that the authorities managing the app don't know. Workarounds for Wuhan's grey-haired residents are even more low-tech. Li's grandparents who don't own smartphones use health certificates issued by their community as a health code substitute. Other neighbourhood committees have their non-smartphone residents print out a paper-version of the health code.

The health code is far from a silver bullet. Ultimately, what generates a green code is the commitment of individuals to stay at home for 14 days, and residential committees, which manage apartment compounds, to manage their designated inhabitants. But even as a pass to help with reopening, it has returned many to some level of normalcy.
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Post-lockdown life in Wuhan is a warning to the world

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Though restaurants have reopened, Wang Lan, who works for a Wuhan-based media company, hasn't eaten out since the city's 76-day lockdown was lifted on April 8. "People generally choose to get food delivered," she says. Back when the epidemic was at its worst, only one person from each family was allowed to leave the apartment compound, for a two-hour window, to buy groceries.

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" “Please don’t spread information about my identity,” one patient wrote on social media. “I’m so sorry to my friends and family that I’ve hurt, but more than the physical pain, it’s been very difficult mentally.” In February, a survey of a thousand people by researchers at Seoul National University found that respondents’ greatest fear about the disease was social stigmatization."

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On the morning of March 23rd, I arrived at the Mapo District Office, a staid government building in northwestern Seoul, where I was greeted by Song In-su, the fifty-three-year-old deputy of the public-relations department. Instead of shaking hands, we awkwardly bumped elbows. Over the weekend, I had received my seventh local-government emergency alert-a text message with a red loudspeaker icon labelled "Mapo District Office"-informing me of new COVID-19 cases in the area where I live. Song had sent them all.

"Our biggest fear right now is a super-spreader," Song told me. This had been apparent in the anti- COVID-19 fortifications I had noticed on my way up to his office, which is on the ninth floor. Bottles of hand sanitizer, now present in every imaginable public space in Mapo, from bus stops to bike racks, had been installed throughout the building. A heat sensor had scrutinized me as I'd walked through the lobby. The elevator buttons were covered with antiviral tape.

On one wall of the conference room where I met with Song, a banner reading "Coronavirus Disease Response Meeting" projected a mood of emergency. Before the pandemic, Song and his colleagues had been preparing voting booths for the local parliamentary elections, which are held every four years, in April. But in mid-February, the coronavirus spread throughout the southeastern city of Daegu, and the priorities of Mapo officials changed. "All our administrative power is concentrated on COVID-19," Song said. "You don't even see any mention of 'Parasite' in the news anymore."

Although new cases in Daegu-where about seven thousand of the country's roughly eleven thousand confirmed cases have originated-had slowed dramatically, inspiring hope that the worst was over for South Koreans, smaller but not insignificant clusters had been surfacing at call centers, churches, hospitals, and gaming cafés in and around Seoul, and also at the airport. On March 16th, President Moon Jae-in declared greater Seoul as the new battlefront. Experts had been warning that, as with any dense metropolis, things could quickly turn ugly. "Think Italy or New York," one had told me.

In Seoul, local governments like the Mapo District Office have been at the front line of containment efforts: testing, monitoring, and tracking patients and disclosing critical information to the public. Like most municipal public-relations officials, Song used to spend his days compiling media coverage of the district office's activities and publishing them in an office bulletin. Now, when a positive case is identified in Mapo, Song springs into action. He strips the information of any identifying markers before posting it on the district office's Web site, blog, and social-media accounts; he also sends out the emergency text alerts. The disclosure of anonymized patient routes, a central feature in South Korea's containment strategy, has set it apart from the United States, which has so far erred on the side of individual privacy, and from neighboring Japan, where testing has been deliberately limited.

South Korea's COVID-19 policies reflect a larger regime of transparency. In daily press briefings, Jung Eun-kyeong, the head of the country's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (K.C.D.C.), has been delivering detailed reports in measured tones. In addition to sharing the routes of confirmed patients, the agency has been distributing infection and testing data to journalists with remarkable frequency. Emergency text alerts about significant developments are sent to every smartphone in the nation. Such openness has been rewarded by an abiding trust in the government's containment protocols. Panic has been minimal; toilet paper is in abundant supply.

Jung has also been candid about the trade-off inherent in these measures. Under the terms of South Korea's Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act-passed after the 2015 MERS outbreak, during which the government's withholding of critical information contributed to further transmissions and deaths-it is now required to publish information that can include infected people's travel routes, the public transport they took, and the medical institutions that are treating them. As long as districts do not reveal the identities of confirmed patients, they have been free to decide levels of disclosure on their own. In a few instances, officials released enough information to make people with COVID-19 publicly identifiable, leading to cases of doxxing and online harassment. "Please don't spread information about my identity," one patient wrote on social media. "I'm so sorry to my friends and family that I've hurt, but more than the physical pain, it's been very difficult mentally." In February, a survey of a thousand people by researchers at Seoul National University found that respondents' greatest fear about the disease was social stigmatization. The National Human Rights Commission of Korea issued a statement calling for stronger measures to protect individuals from being outed. Experts have also cautioned that over-disclosing can be counterproductive, as patients fearful of public censure may choose to hide instead of seeking treatment.

Following the National Human Rights Commission's statement, the K.C.D.C. had distributed new guidelines on disclosure to local governments, a copy of which Song held in his hand. Mapo, as far as I could tell, had not committed any such blunders, but it was clear that the increased scrutiny weighed on Song, who repeatedly noted to me that his reports were carefully written. Still, he said, somewhat cautiously, "I think we should try to disclose as much information as we can, rather than holding back." For Song, this has meant including patients' age and gender, their neighborhood of residence, and the names of businesses and apartment complexes they had visited, which he sees as a way of assuaging other residents' anxieties. "What most people ultimately want to know is whether their activities overlapped with patient routes," he explained. In Mapo, this has also boosted testing. "A lot of people come in after seeing the published patient routes, concerned that they might have been in the same place," one of the doctors at the local testing center, just outside Song's building, said.

In the conference room, Song showed me the Mapo District Office Web site, where the dozen or so cases that had been confirmed in the area had been organized by date into a neat table. The entries, each appended with a detailed list of the stops the patient had made, in sparse, sterile language, read like a ship's logbook. "08:00 left home (on foot) / mask worn," began one entry for Mapo's fourth patient, dated from March 6th to 10th. The post went on to note each bus and subway transfer ("Bus transfer to no. 7730 in front of Sangam High School → disembarked at Susaeggyo / mask worn"), as well as a six-minute stop at a local supermarket, before ending with "15:00 tested positive → 19:00 transferred to Seoul Medical Center." Emergency text alerts, because of their character limit, linked recipients to these entries rather than relaying them in full. "For the text alerts, we use something called a 'remote broadcasting apparatus,' " Song said. "Then it's sent to every phone in a five-kilometre radius through a nearby base station."

Public appetite for this information is voracious. "Most of the residents' feedback is asking for more information, for us to be even more revealing," Song said. Indeed, a beleaguered epidemiological investigator told me, "Sometimes when we go to an apartment complex office to collect C.C.T.V. footage, residents run up demanding we tell them the block and unit number. But then other people ask us not to disclose a certain location, especially if it's where they live." The naming of local businesses in particular, which some local governments have avoided, hasn't always gone over well with their proprietors. "Because disclosure affects public perception of the place, there's a bit of a financial blow," Song said, apologetically.

"It's a double-edged sword," Seong Han-bit, the thirty-six-year-old owner of Stance Coffee, a small, independent coffee shop in Seoul, told me. His café has nice lighting and copies of Kinfolk, the chic Danish magazine, at every table. On the morning of March 28th, Mapo's Patient 15, a woman in her twenties, had briefly stopped by to order a drink. Song's writeup for her, posted two days later, was unusually long. The woman had arrived at the airport-where she initially tested negative at a screening checkpoint-after visiting the United States. In Seoul, she had visited a cosmetics store, a fried-chicken joint, a hair salon, a post office, and multiple convenience stores and restaurants, before testing positive on March 29th. According to the report, she was believed to have caught the virus in America.

On a popular local Facebook group, someone had written a post denouncing her for being so irresponsible. "Just die alone, why would you cause other people harm," one member said. Another remarked that the patient should have been hit with a giant hospital bill in the United States. The original poster, perhaps sensing that this conversation was bringing out people's worst impulses, locked the comments.

On Monday, March 30th, after district officials fumigated Stance Coffee, and a major broadcaster mentioned the shop by name in a report about "re-imported" COVID-19 cases, Seong opened up his café. "Because I personally don't keep up with patient routes, I assumed that other people wouldn't either," he said. "But, after the post went up yesterday, I felt it in my bones. From 5 P.M. to 11 P.M. that day, not a single customer showed up. I thought, 'Ah, this really does have a big impact after all.' "

Sitting in his now empty café, Seong had also received a string of interrogatory phone calls from customers, demanding to know things like whether the barista working on the day in question had since been self-isolating. In reality, Seong told me, Patient 15 had been in the store for only a minute or two while she waited for her order. The barista, who had been wearing a mask during his shift, had interacted with her for just a moment. "It would be nice if the detailed circumstances of the encounter were listed alongside the other information," Seong said.

"I'm worried about the future, but I still have to stay open to pay the rent," he continued. "Who knows whether people will come or not? I'm approaching it with the mind-set that I should try to make any sale that I can, even if it's only ten thousand won"-about eight dollars. Business had already slowed once, after the outbreak in Daegu first began. Still, Seong seemed to be maintaining an admirable sense of social-mindedness. "If I selfishly consider only my café and nothing else, of course I'd think, Why would they publish this and ruin my business?" he said. "But thinking from the perspective of other people-a parent with a child, for example-I still think it's right to publish it."

In late March, the government's pleas for social distancing grew more vigorous. In a national address, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun announced that the government would enforce a ban on large rallies and gatherings in Seoul, which hadn't abated. Local governments like Mapo were ordered to take strong administrative action against businesses violating the city's outbreak-prevention guidelines. "With the understanding that the next two weeks are a decisive time that offers us the chance to win the war against COVID-19, I ask that the South Korean public coöperate with several strong measures being taken," Chung said. "For the next two weeks, we will calmly prepare for new everyday lives. We must change how we work, how our children learn, and we must practice everyday containment measures in every moment of our lives."

In Mapo, I had been perceiving, by subtle degrees, the sort of change that Chung was talking about. The outbreak, now a global pandemic, had recast small daily routines. Like many others in South Korea, I obsessively combed through the trackers and maps created with disclosed-patient data. (This replaced checking the weather, which became meaningless once I stopped leaving the house.) For a while, as pins and lines indicating confirmed cases sprang up in neighborhoods outside of Mapo, we seemed to be avoiding the worst. But, in early March, after more than fifty patients emerged at an insurance call center in Guro, just two districts over, the emergency text alerts became more localized and frequent. One patient from this cluster, as I had learned with a stab of alarm two weeks earlier, had passed through Mangwon Market-a long promenade, lined with street-food venders and open-air produce stalls, where I did much of my grocery shopping. District officials had shut down the shops for two days in order to sanitize the market, but I had avoided going back for a week. Song, upon hearing this, waved a hand dismissively. "Places where patients recently passed through are much safer, because we send out a sanitization team with our contact tracers," he said.

After this incident, a fresh sense of crisis seemed to have been awakened in the neighborhood. During smoke breaks outside my apartment, I spoke with my landlady about local developments while she wiped down the entrance keypad with alcohol wipes. As the magnolias on my street bloomed into white, scalloped buds, masks appeared on faces everywhere. Outside of pharmacies, people lined up at the same time every day to buy their weekly allotment of masks, which the government had rationed to two per person. Businesses put up no-mask-no-entry posters. Delivery drivers began to plant their feet far back and crane forward to gingerly hand you your food.

In spite of such heightened awareness, social distancing in Mapo hadn't been entirely successful. Most businesses escaped an outright ban, and cafés and restaurants remained open, albeit to fewer customers. "The biggest problems are gaming cafés, churches, and Hongdae clubs," Song said. The neighborhood of Hongdae, several blocks east of Mangwon Market, is a night-life destination for tourists and for students from the nearby Hongik University. There, crowds of young people had been partying at clubs and bars that took your temperature before letting you in. A friend of mine, who recently shut down his bar in Hongdae, told me, "I was starting to get annoyed by the people even showing up." This would amount to significant losses, he conceded-but he didn't want to be stuck in a bar full of customers cavalier enough to show up in the midst of a pandemic.

Businesses and religious institutions that violate the outbreak-prevention guidelines-which mandate proprietors to enforce mask-wearing and the maintenance of a two-metre safety buffer between people on the premises, among other measures-are subject to a fine of up to twenty-five hundred dollars. On a recent Sunday, three hundred or so district officials visited several of the more stubborn local churches, in a final attempt to dissuade them from holding services. A few remain undeterred, but the vast majority have switched to online worship. And though some of Hongdae's clubs had recently re-opened, looking to draw in social-distancing apostates, most shut down again after a round of inspections on April 1st. "It's deserted out there," Song told me.

The patient information that Song discloses comes from Kim Mi-ra, the head of infectious-disease management at Mapo's community health center, which is next door to Song's building. In front of the health center, a banner announced that all regular services had been halted. By the entrance, where two workers stood waiting to spritz any visitors with hand sanitizer, a plastic canopy had been erected to serve as a makeshift reception area. Inside an adjacent tent, doctors in full protective gear test thirty to forty people each day. The process takes just a few minutes, and results are usually delivered within twenty-four hours, by text message.

When a patient tests positive here, Kim's team retraces their movements based on their oral testimony, and then combs through relevant C.C.T.V. footage in order to locate others who might have been exposed. Restaurants, where people must take their masks off to eat, are the most common sites of exposure. "Say there's someone who was within two metres of the patient at a restaurant, but we don't know who that person is, except what they look like in the C.C.T.V. footage," Kim said. "Then we ask the credit-card company to pull up that customer's information and ask them to tell them to contact us." That person is then put under monitored self-isolation for two weeks, using an app that tracks his phone to insure that he isn't breaking quarantine.

Behind this model of contact tracing is a vast surveillance apparatus expressly designed for such outbreak scenarios. Under South Korea's Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act, health authorities, with the approval of the police and other supervising agencies, can make use of cell-phone G.P.S. data, credit-card payment information, and travel and medical records. As of March 26th, the government has also officially launched the Epidemic Investigation Support System, a data-analysis platform that automates the process, allowing investigators to get clearance and pull up patient trajectories in under a minute. (Previously, the process took about a day.)

Although some had anticipated a backlash to such sweeping electronic surveillance, public outrage has been nearly nonexistent. According to Kim Min-ho, a law professor and one of the country's human-rights commissioners, this is because these measures can be used only in the context of disease outbreaks, making it impossible for them to be co-opted for, say, anti-terrorism campaigns.

"I think there's a difference in reasoning and perception at play here," Kim told me, by phone. "The United States was quick to ban businesses, while countries like France instituted lockdowns. But South Korea hasn't been able to do the same because we're very cautious about these kinds of measures, in the same way that other countries are cautious about privacy." Mere weeks after the initial flurry of articles pondering whether or not democracies were better equipped to deal with pandemics, few countries were getting away with not sacrificing some kinds of freedom. As Kim pointed out, the true question was which freedoms to prioritize. The chaos of the MERS outbreak had left the public with a grim conviction: sacrificing some individual privacy was simply the upfront cost of avoiding more debilitating consequences down the line.

South Koreans have decided that, during an infectious-disease outbreak, there is a strong, pragmatic case to be made in favor of what might be called virtuous surveillance-a radically transparent version of people-tracking that is subject to public scrutiny and paired with stringent legal safeguards against abuse. Despite its imperfections, South Korea's policy is striking for the fact that it brings the mechanisms and outcomes of surveillance into the public forum. In doing so, it appeals to a deeper sense of civic trust-the belief that, in a crisis, the citizenry can be relied upon to play its part.

Late last month, I experienced the outbreak-surveillance system for myself. Upon walking through the front door of Gachon University Gil Medical Center in Incheon, I was surrounded by a contingent of hospital workers wearing goggles, masks, face shields, and plastic gowns. After taking my temperature, a nurse asked me if I'd recently travelled to any high-risk areas. I said no. At the next checkpoint, another nurse took my driver's license and entered my personal identification number into her computer, where a modified version of the Drug Utilization Review-a drug-prescription cross-referencing system widely used in South Korea-pulled up my travel history to check whether I was lying. I wasn't, so I received a yellow sticker. Eom Joong-sik, an infectious-disease physician who is advising the government on COVID-19, was waiting at the end of the checkpoint.

"This is one of the benefits of having a universal health-care system," Eom told me, gesturing behind us. "When they enter your personal identification number, they can review your travel history."

In the empty consultation room where we sat, Eom spoke bluntly about the current state of affairs. "We really don't know whether the South Korean system has succeeded or not yet," he said. "There has been a constant stream of new cases in the capital area." With community-based cases steadily waning, re-imported cases seeping in through the airport have become the latest threat. A breach here could undo much of the painstakingly made progress so far. "It's not enough that we alone are successful in containment efforts," Kim Mi-ra had told me. "There's a high likelihood that the disease can be brought back in from other countries at any time."

Eom said, "If there's a major outbreak here, what happened in Daegu may not even compare," adding that more than half of South Korea's population of roughly fifty million lives in the capital area. Moreover, Seoul is nearly twice as dense as New York City. If infections proliferated, he warned, "This sort of patient-movement disclosure or contact tracing will become meaningless." Far more drastic measures, such as military-enforced lockdowns, might well occur.

Seoul poses a far more vexing set of challenges than Daegu did. The vastness of the greater capital area makes potential infection routes difficult to pin down or predict. There are too many blind spots, such as crowded subways and buses, where C.C.T.V. footage provides few usable leads. When I asked Eom what the likelihood of a major outbreak in Seoul is, he let out a loud, unsettled laugh. "I'm just praying it doesn't happen," he said.

Resisting complacency, Eom said, would be critical. But in recent days, public life in Seoul has begun filling out again. Despite the closure of high-risk businesses like clubs and churches, lines at popular eateries and cafés have reappeared. In the parks and on the esplanades along the Han, the river winding through Seoul, crowds of picnickers have begun to materialize among the cherry blossoms, with the dazed, sleepy air of animals emerging from their dens after a long winter. If another crisis loomed, it was hard to tell. "All of the control and containment procedures essentially rely on the same thing," Eom told me. "And that is the coöperation and responsible conduct of the citizenry."

A Guide to the Coronavirus

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Seoul's Radical Experiment in Digital Contact Tracing

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On the morning of March 23rd, I arrived at the Mapo District Office, a staid government building in northwestern Seoul, where I was greeted by Song In-su, the fifty-three-year-old deputy of the public-relations department. Instead of shaking hands, we awkwardly bumped elbows.

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At the end of January, MobiHealthNews reported that Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center (SPHCC), was using California-based connected health startup VivaLNK's continuous temperature sensor to monitor COVID-19 patients, which reduces the risks of caregivers being exposed to the virus.

SPHCC recently announced that they are using Bluetooth IoT products and solutions provider Cassia Network's gateways, together with VivaLNK's medical wearable sensors to monitor COVID-19 patients.
HOW IT WORKS
VivaLNK's body temperature sensors are applied directly to the patient to provide continuous, real-time monitoring of any changes in body temperature. Cassia's gateways are being used to receive real-time patient data from the sensors and wirelessly transmit this data to a nurse's station for continuous monitoring.

Cassia's IoT Access Controller, a powerful network management tool is being used by medical staff to monitor patients and to provide a holistic view of their vitals in real-time. Cassia's gateways allow up to 40 Bluetooth Low Energy devices to be paired and connected simultaneously while providing the long-range connectivity needed to cover multiple rooms in the SPHCC.

The SPHCC along with seven other hospitals throughout China are currently using Cassia's gateways with additional deployments in other medical centers in the near future.
THE LARGER TREND
SPHCC has been applying advanced tech to help in the diagnosis and monitoring of COVID-19 patients. It has also worked with Yitu Healthcare, a Shanghai-based AI startup, to co-develop the AI-powered Intelligent Evaluation System of Chest CT for COVID-19, MobiHealthNews reported.

China has seen a dramatic drop in confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 31 new cases and 4 deaths as of 3 April, according to an update by China's National Health Commission.

A 2017 Aruba study indicated that 73 percent of healthcare organizations use IoT for monitoring and maintenance, which was ranked as the number one IoT use by 42 percent of executives - higher than all other industry sectors. This highlights the importance of IoT-driven patient monitoring in healthcare. Given the highly contagious nature of the coronavirus, IoT tech and telehealth, which facilitates remote monitoring and consultation, has really come into the fold.
ON THE RECORD
"Cassia is excited to be working with VivaLNK to help fight the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 as well as helping save lives," said Felix Zhao, CEO of Cassia Networks. "With the combination of VivaLNK's continuous health monitoring solutions, Cassia's Bluetooth gateways and IoT Access Controller, we can better equip clinical centers and medical staff worldwide with the critical tools they need to address this, and future pandemics."

"The concept of remote patient monitoring using wireless medical wearables can extend into a clinical environment where there is a need to minimize patient contact and for a more flexible deployment model," said Jiang Li, CEO of VivaLNK. "The combination of VivaLNK sensors and Cassia's gateways enables medical centers to rapidly deploy patient monitoring solutions not only in China but worldwide."

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SPHCC employs IoT tech and wearable sensors to monitor COVID-19 patients

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At the end of January, MobiHealthNews reported that Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center (SPHCC), was using California-based connected health startup VivaLNK's continuous temperature sensor to monitor COVID-19 patients, which reduces the risks of caregivers being exposed to the virus.

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"The color on the screen determines your options, based on your current health status: green means that you’re good to go, yellow means you’ve been close to somebody who’s been sick, and red means you have to stay home."

"Chinese citizens have to give up their national identity number or passport number, as well as their phone number. The app then asks them to complete a questionnaire about travel history and current symptoms. "

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First, there was "flattening the curve."

For many parts of the world, that conversation is now shifting towards "contact tracing" - keeping track of those who tested positive, negative, and those who are at risk of being exposed - as governments grasp for a solution to reopening their economies in a post-peak coronavirus world.

But the threat of a resurgence is still top of mind. Open too quickly, and cases will surge. Too late, and the economic consequences will be even more devastating than they already are.

China has taken the lead with mobile technology that relies on scanning QR codes and an app. The goal is to curb the spread of the coronavirus by indicating who can go where, CNN reports.

"Technology now plays a critical role in containing the pandemic," Xian-Sheng Hua, a health AI expert at China's e-commerce giant Alibaba, told CNN.

Here's how it works: Chinese citizens have to give up their national identity number or passport number, as well as their phone number. The app then asks them to complete a questionnaire about travel history and current symptoms. According to CNN, authorities then verify this information and are assigned a color.

The color on the screen determines your options, based on your current health status: green means that you're good to go, yellow means you've been close to somebody who's been sick, and red means you have to stay home.

How exactly the app determines if you have a yellow or red score is still unclear. Critics argue it could lead to abuses of power and the targeting of marginalized groups.

In order to safely reopen their doors, many businesses in Chinese cities are posting public-facing QR codes that potential customers must scan using their smartphone.

"I want to go to a Japanese restaurant," reporter Eunice Yoon explained in a CNBC report from earlier this week. "To get into the building, not only do I have to get my temperature checked and register my name, but I also need to scan this QR code that shows where I've been in the past 14 days."

Singapore also implemented a similar contact tracing app last month called TraceTogether. But the app has seen only limited success with only 12 percent of the population having installed it, according to The Guardian.

A system implemented in Moscow, Russia requires people to download a QR code to move around the city. They first have to register on a government website and declare their intended route in advance. The QR code then gives them the authorization to leave the house.

In the US, tech giants Apple and Google announced a joint effort to bring contact tracing to the Western world. Their tracking app is designed to tell you if you've recently been exposed to somebody who tested positive by taking advantage of low-power Bluetooth technology.

Software that will allow the app to work across both Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile platforms and devices is in the works, but a full-fledged app is still "months" out, according to the companies.

Plenty of other countries are working on their own solutions. Germany and the UK have announced plans for their own apps.

Privacy concerns over the extensive collection of location and health data might delay the rollout, particularly in Germany. Privacy advocates argue that such an app is "highly problematic," as the Financial Times reports.

But experts argue it's the sensible way to go forward.

"If we want to emerge from these restrictions on contact, then we need another tool," Christian Drosten from the Virology Institute of Berlin's Charité hospital and notable commentator on Germany's coronavirus response, told the Financial Times.

"We really need this app and we need to persuade as many people as possible to use it," he added.

READ MORE: China is fighting the coronavirus with a digital QR code. Here's how it works [ The Guardian]

More on contact tracing: Apple and Google to Launch App for Tracking the Coronavirus

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In China, this coronavirus app pretty much controls your life

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First, there was "flattening the curve." For many parts of the world, that conversation is now shifting towards "contact tracing" - keeping track of those who tested positive, negative, and those who are at risk of being exposed - as governments grasp for a solution to reopening their economies in a post-peak coronavirus world.

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Quick reads: Medical wearable sensors monitor Coronavirus patients in China

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Henkel, NewPro3D providing additive manufacturing (AM) solutions at production scale; VADovations licenses IP from Mayo Clinic

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When Barack Obama was US president, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had a useful motto: "Never let a serious crisis go to waste: it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." The Chinese authorities have clearly taken this to heart - as evidenced by the unprecedented scale of their geographical lockdowns and quarantining, restrictions on movement, industrial slowdowns and heightened surveillance.

At this distance, it's impossible to judge how effective these measures really are. But all the experienced China-watchers of my acquaintance tell me that one should never underestimate the gap between realities on the ground and the story as told from Beijing. An instructive illustration of this is provided by a fascinating dispatch from Wuhan in the London Review of Books. It's by Wang Xiuying (who describes herself as "a pessimist who's trying hard to stay positive in self-quarantine"). She tells of a good deal of local chaos and serious tensions between the provincial authorities and the big cheeses in Beijing. She also describes great local heroism (particularly among health workers) and self-sacrifice. All of which sounds more plausible to me.

One thing that does appear to be happening in China, however, is deployment of the state's surveillance capabilities. At the heart of the project is the ubiquity of smartphones. According to the New York Times, citizens are now being required to install an app on their phones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. People sign up for the "Alipay health code" and are assigned a colour code - green, yellow or red - that indicates their health status. A green code enables its holder to move about unrestricted. Someone with a yellow code may be asked to stay at home for seven days. Red means a two-week quarantine.

'Code red' travellers are tracked back to their family homes where police tape is put over their front doors

The system is already in use in 200 cities and is being rolled out nationwide. The NYT report has an interesting video showing a subway guard checking every passenger's colour code as they go past the gate. But an analysis of the app's code found that it does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk; it also shares information with the police, setting "a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides". Writing in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, the legal scholar John Palfrey describes how this system has been used to track "code red" travellers through subway and railway networks back to their family homes in Wuhan, where police tape is put over their front doors and neighbours are asked to call a hotline if they see anyone leave the premises.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, we're in a "phoney war" phase as we wait for infection to spread. But already there are useful lessons to be learned. The first is about the fragility of supply chains. If humanity survives for another century or more, one of the things that will puzzle future historians is how we failed to notice that we were building an entire civilisation on top of logistical systems of unbelievable complexity and vulnerability. We are finally beginning to realise that while "just in time" production and delivery systems may be good at reducing overheads, they are also only as strong as their weakest links. And an overwhelming number of those links are in China and points further east. If you doubt that, just visit an Apple store and ask to buy a pair of the company's fancy new earbuds. And chains like this do not degrade gracefully: they can fail suddenly and without warning.

We're also learning more in this unfolding crisis about the terminal malignancy of social media. On 19 February, a group of 27 public-health specialists published a letter in the Lancet expressing their concern that "the rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin."

Among the posts providing the "user engagement" that social media platforms prize are stories claiming that the virus was created by the CIA, and that it was bioengineered by the Wuhan Institute for Virology, or that a lab worker was infected while handling a bat and then transmitted the disease to others outside the lab.

Finally, isn't it interesting how we have heard nothing recently from Michael Gove about how tired the public is of hearing from experts? Miming seriousness about the coronavirus threat while being flanked by two real, grownup experts - people who actually know what they're doing - must have been a salutary experience for Boris Johnson. Wouldn't it be nice if as a result of this crisis we rediscovered how important it is to be governed by people who know what they're doing.

What I'm reading

Up close with the Donald's eminence grise
Want to know the man behind Trump's social media guru better? Andrew Marantz has written a compelling profile of Brad Parscale .

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the pool...
Why Uber and co are bad for the climate: read the Union of Concerned Scientists' counterintuitive findings on their website.

Be afraid... be very afraid
How to destroy a democracy: read George Packer's startling - and really alarming - account in the Atlantic of how successful Trump has been at eviscerating the institutions of the American state.
Topics

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How a global health crisis turns into a state-run surveillance opportunity | John Naughton

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When Barack Obama was US president, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had a useful motto: "Never let a serious crisis go to waste: it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

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" Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people’s movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it’s useful to make those data public. Some say it could even be harmful"

"...a detailed log of their movements down to the minute — in some cases traced using closed-circuit television and credit-card transactions, with the time and names of businesses they visited. In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet and whether or not they wore a mask. Even overnight stays at ‘love motels’ have been noted."

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For the past month, South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19. Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people's movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it's useful to make those data public. Some say it could even be harmful.

The first cases in the country were reported in late January, and then surged a few weeks later. As case numbers grew, authorities launched a massive contact-tracing and testing regime to identify and then isolate infected people, even setting up drive-through testing centres. So far, the country has tested more people per capita than any country in the world - a total of nearly 300,000 people. As of 17 March, the country had reported 8,413 cases.

When a person tests positive, their city or district might send out an alert to people living nearby about their movements before being diagnosed. A typical alert can contain the infected person's age and gender, and a detailed log of their movements down to the minute - in some cases traced using closed-circuit television and credit-card transactions, with the time and names of businesses they visited. In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet and whether or not they wore a mask. Even overnight stays at 'love motels' have been noted.

Other countries, including Singapore, have released data such as the age or gender of people with COVID-19, but nothing as detailed as in South Korea.

Public trust

The South Korean government says the public is more likely to trust it if it releases transparent and accurate information about the virus, including travel histories of confirmed patients. Laws passed since the country's last major disease outbreak, of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2015, now specifically allow authorities to publish this information.

Numerous websites and smartphone apps have also sprung up to collect and map the data, such as coronamap.site. Checking the maps has become part of daily life for many South Koreans.

Experts and the World Health Organization say that South Korea's extensive tracing, testing and isolation measures - along with campaigns encouraging people to avoid large gatherings - have helped to reduce the virus's spread. Over the past two weeks, the number of new cases being reported each day in South Korea has dropped dramatically, from a peak of 909 cases announced on 29 February to 74 on 16 March.

But the specificity of the publicly available data has raised privacy concerns. The data trails released about some of the infected people have been so detailed that they could be identifiable, say some researchers and human-rights activists.

It might be useful for epidemiologists to "privately and securely have this information on hand, especially for contact tracing", says Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts. But she says she's not sure that publicizing such information is worth the risk of exposing people to the social stigma that might come if their community knows they are infected. The potential for stigma could even dissuade some infected people from coming forward to get tested, says Majumder.

Human-rights concerns

On 9 March, Choi Young-ae, chair of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, also expressed concern that the "excessive disclosure of private information" could cause people with symptoms to avoid testing.

In response, South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on 14 March that such detailed location information should be released only when epidemiological investigations could not otherwise identify all the people with whom an infected person had been in contact before their diagnosis.

The idea is that a person with mild symptoms can check the travel logs to see whether they might have come in contact with an infected person, which could help medical officials decide who should be screened, says Sung-il Cho, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University. He thinks authorities are justified in making location information public for this purpose.

But he says an unintended consequence has been that people are avoiding places that an infected person has visited, even though the places have been closed and cleaned since then.

Personal hygiene and social distancing are more important than looking up websites to avoid places that infected people have visited, says Oh Myoung-don, an infectious-disease physician at Seoul National University.

Legacy of infection

South Korea's data transparency during this outbreak has its origins in how the government handled the 2015 outbreak of MERS, which reportedly infected 186 people in South Korea and killed 36. The government at the time initially refused to identify the hospitals in which infected people were being treated, but a software programmer made a map of cases based on crowdsourced reports and anonymous tips from hospital staff. Eventually, the government relented and named the affected hospitals.

The public broadly supports the government publishing individuals' movement, says Youngkee Ju, a researcher in health journalism at Hallym University in Chuncheon. In 1,000-person surveys that he co-authored, published in February and earlier this month, most respondents supported the government sharing travel details of people with COVID-19. Furthermore, most "preferred the public good to individual rights", says Ju. He and his colleagues intend to perform a follow-up survey to find out exactly how much personal information the public supports disclosing.

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South Korea is reporting intimate details of COVID-19 cases: has it helped?

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For the past month, South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19. Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people's movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it's useful to make those data public.

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Chinese designer Sun Dayong created a design for a shield that protects wearers from contracting COVID-19, the coronavirus disease.

The shield is called "Be a Batman," and inspired by the wings of a bat.

UV radiation on the shield is designed to kill the virus, while the whole device is "a shell that can wrap us up and distance ourselves from the world."

The coronavirus outbreak that originated in China has killed 3,900 people worldwide and infected more than 111,000, according to recent totals.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The worldwide death toll of the novel coronavirus disease that originated in Wuhan, China, is now more than 3,300, and the virus has infected more than 97,000 people.

On January 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared it a global health emergency. The virus has disrupted travel worldwide, leading to flight cancellations, quarantines, and other breakdowns in movement.

Chinese architect Sun Dayong has a possible way to curb the spread of this virus: Be a Batman. He designed a concept for a wearable shield partly inspired by the structure of bat wings. Experts believe that bats may have originally hosted this novel coronavirus before it jumped to humans, as well as past coronaviruses including Ebola and SARS.

Take a look at his design here.

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An architect in China created a wearable shield worn like a backpack designed to protect from coronavirus

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Chinese designer Sun Dayong created a design for a shield that protects wearers from contracting COVID-19, the coronavirus disease. The shield is called "Be a Batman," and inspired by the wings of a bat. UV radiation on the shield is designed to kill the virus, while the whole device is "a shell that can wrap us up and distance ourselves from the world."

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"authorities are using a color-coded health system to dictate where citizens can go"

"The initiative was first piloted in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Authorities there first launched a "health code program" on a government website, and later embedded it into the Alipay app being used by people in the area"

"To start traveling again, people have to fill out a questionnaire that asks for details like body temperature and health background. The software then analyzes it and generates a color code — green, yellow, or red — that identifies a person's health status."

"Anyone with a red or yellow code is not allowed to travel. A red code means you either have or likely have the coronavirus, while a yellow code means you have had contact with another infected person. A green code means you're symptom-free and allowed to travel. Anyone with a green code can go past checkpoints in subway stations, restaurants, hotels, and apartment blocks."

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Provinces and cities across China are slowly lifting their strict coronavirus lockdown measures. Wuhan, where the coronavirus broke out, just lifted its lockdown.

But as people resume their lives, local authorities are trying to prevent further spread by controlling citizens' movements via smartphone software installed in WeChat and Alipay, two hugely popular apps.

After people fill out a quick health survey, the software issues them with a colored health code - green, yellow, or red - which dictates whether they can leave the house and where they can go.

Officials manning various checkpoints across the country are checking people's health apps to see where they are allowed to go. Anyone with a green code is free to travel.

But Western nations are critical of this mass surveillance tool and questioning what else the data is being used for.

Scroll down to see how it works.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As provinces and cities across China gradually roll back their coronavirus lockdown measures, authorities trying to prevent another outbreak are using smartphone software to monitor citizens' health and dictate where they go.

Officials in Wuhan, where the virus first broke out, are also using this software to limit its citizens' movements, the BBC reported. The city lifted its lockdown at midnight local time on Wednesday.

The software is installed in WeChat and Alipay, the instant-messaging app, and Alipay, the online payment platform operated by Alibaba. Almost everyone with a smartphone in China has one or both of these apps.

In order to travel, people have to fill out a quick health survey. After that, the software issues them with a colored health code - green, yellow, or red - which dictates whether they can leave the house and where they can go.

The initiative was first introduced by officials in the eastern city of Hangzhou, but others have since followed suit. As of February 25, the program was being used in 200 Chinese cities. This number has likely grown.

Scroll down to see how the technology works and why some surveillance experts are concerned.

And as people start moving freely again, the government is trying to keep track of anyone who might still be infected to avoid further outbreak.

To do this, local governments integrated a tracking software into two commonly-used apps: WeChat, the instant-messaging app, and Alipay, an online payment platform part-owned by Alibaba.

As of the end of 2019, WeChat and Weixin - its Chinese version - had 1.16 billion monthly active users.

Alipay has about 900 million users across China, according to The New York Times.

Local authorities developed a health code program and integrated them into area users' apps.

This means the apps are providing the technology and access to the health programs, but local governments are creating the database and issuing the health codes.

The initiative was first piloted in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Authorities there first launched a "health code program" on a government website, and later embedded it into the Alipay app being used by people in the area, the Financial Times reported.

Shortly afterwards the municipal government of Beijing followed suit, integrating the health code program into area users' WeChat apps.

The apps can still perform their normal functions.

To start traveling again, people have to fill out a questionnaire that asks for details like body temperature and health background. The software then analyzes it and generates a color code - green, yellow, or red - that identifies a person's health status.

A green code means you're symptom-free and allowed to travel. Anyone with a green code can go past checkpoints in subway stations, restaurants, hotels, and apartment blocks.
Source: Associated Press

Here's what one of these checkpoints, seen in a subway station in Hangzhou, looks like. People show their codes on their phones to a security guard, who either wave them through or stop them.

-Paul Mozur 孟建国 (@paulmozur) March 2, 2020

People are constantly reminded that in order to get around, they must show their codes. Here, a staff member on a Wuhan subway is holding a sign that reads: "Always wear a face mask, avoid gatherings, scan code when getting off the train."
Source: Associated Press

On February 25, the system had already been in use in at least 200 cities, with the goal of a nationwide rollout.

But it's still unclear how exactly the system classifies people and where the data is analyzed. Some users even reported seeing their color codes change without explanation.

An Ant Financial representative did not respond to Business Insider's request for clarification.

Experts and activists have criticized China's mass surveillance, and are questioning what else this data is being used for.

"We've seen the use of big data to predictive policing and detain people really for no reason," human rights adviser at Amnesty International, William Nee, told Reuters.

"So there's a concern that although this data is being perhaps collected for a legitimate purpose, that it could potentially and eventually be misused in ways that we can't predict right now."

Experts have also noted that this sort of surveillance is not unlike that in Xinjiang, where millions of Uighur Muslims are monitored by the Chinese government.

Referring to the app, New York Times reporter Paul Mozur tweeted: "The color codes, checkpoints, and phone searches all smack of policies carried out in Xinjiang. People in China's east aren't used to it."
Read more about how experts think about China's coronavirus surveillance here.

Both Tencent and Alibaba have firmly denied providing any user data to the government's health code program, saying that the developers have to ask for user permission before obtaining data outside the questionnaire.

A representative for Ant Financial, which operates Alipay, told Business Insider in a statement:

"We believe digital technology can and should play an active role in helping contain the global spread of the COVID-19 outbreak.

"Ant Financial requires that all third-party developers, including those who offer health code services using our technology platform, strictly adhere to our data security and privacy requirements, which include obtaining user consent before providing services."

Tencent and Alibaba, which part-owns Ant Financial, also said that the government health software hosted on their platforms are required to ask for user permission to access their locations, the Financial Times reported.

But people in China think the system is vital in protecting public health, and say it makes them feel "safe."

Wu Shenghong, who lives in Wuhan, told the Associated Press that the system reassures her that people who are not considered healthy "are definitely not running around outside. I feel safe."

An unnamed Shanghai resident also told Reuters in mid-March: "It's my first time to come outside after the epidemic. But I already used the QR codes several times and I think it's good."

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As China lifts its coronavirus lockdowns, authorities are using a color-coded health system to dictate where citizens can go. Here's how it works.

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Provinces and cities across China are slowly lifting their strict coronavirus lockdown measures. Wuhan, where the coronavirus broke out, just lifted its lockdown. But as people resume their lives, local authorities are trying to prevent further spread by controlling citizens' movements via smartphone software installed in WeChat and Alipay, two hugely popular apps.

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China has launched an app for people to check if they've crossed paths with anyone infected with the Wuhan coronavirus.

The "Close Contact Detector" app was rolled out by the National Health Commission on Saturday.

The app requires users to input their phone number, which is then used to track the person's past locations in relation to other app users.

"Close contact refers to someone who has come in close distance, with no effective protection, with confirmed cases, suspected cases or mild cases," the National Health Commission said.

The Commission said that on a flight, for example, passengers on the same row, and three rows in front and three behind, as an infected person are regarded as being in "close contact."

The virus, which started in Wuhan in December, has killed more than 1,000 people and infected more than 42,000 globally, although the majority of cases are in the Hubei province of China.

This is not the first time that China has used its considerable surveillance resources and advanced technology in the quest to contain the Wuhan virus.

Drones that issue medical commands to citizens have been spotted over towns.

In one video, a drone can be heard telling an old lady: "You shouldn't walk about without wearing a mask."

Chinese officials are monitoring the locations of those suspected to have contracted the virus and told to stay at home, and are catching those who break curfew via facial recognition cameras.

Reuters reported this month that the facial-recognition firm Megvii said it is testing a new "AI temperature measurement system" in Beijing that "detects temperature with thermal cameras and uses body and facial data to identify individuals."

Hong Kong-based technology lawyer Carolyn Bigg told the BBC the new app was a useful aide.

"From a Chinese perspective this is a really useful service for people. It's a really powerful tool that really shows the power of data being used for good," she said.

The app was made by the General Office of the State Council and China Electronics Technology Group Corporations (CETC.)

While the technology is being put to good use in this case, in one other, many residents of China have complained on social media that their compulsory face masks have made it impossible to unlock their phones with Face ID.

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China launched a new app that warns people if they've come into contact with anyone who has the Wuhan coronavirus, the latest surveillance state measure to contain the disease

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China has launched an app for people to check if they've crossed paths with anyone infected with the Wuhan coronavirus. The "Close Contact Detector" app was rolled out by the National Health Commission on Saturday. The app requires users to input their phone number, which is then used to track the person's past locations in relation to other app users.

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"As South Korea battles a snowballing number of Covid-19 cases, the government is letting people know if they were in the vicinity of a patient. But the volume of information has led to some awkward moments and now there is as much fear of social stigma as of illness"
"
"I didn't know my mother was a follower of Shincheonji [church]," he wrote. He went on to defend his wife, a nurse, who had been criticised for visiting so many places during her incubation period.

The husband said her job was to accompany people with physical disabilities to clinics for appointments, and she had no idea she had the virus.
"It is true my wife moved around a lot, but please stop cursing her. Her only fault is marrying someone like me, and having to work and take care of the children." "
"
"Doctors warn that online pursuit of patients could have very serious consequences. Malicious comments online have long been a problem in South Korea, and in some cases have led to suicide."

"Lee Su-young, a psychiatrist at Myongji Hospital in Goyang, Gyeonggi, told BBC Korean that some of her patients "were more afraid of being blamed than dying of the virus". "

"It was at Myongji Hospital that the two people accused of being in adulterous relationship were treated. One is known to have high levels of anxiety and suffered sleep deprivation due to online comments."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As South Korea battles a snowballing number of Covid-19 cases, the government is letting people know if they were in the vicinity of a patient. But the volume of information has led to some awkward moments and now there is as much fear of social stigma as of illness, as Hyung Eun Kim of BBC News Korean reports.

As I sit at home, my phone beeps alarmingly with emergency alerts.

"A 43-year-old man, resident of Nowon district, tested positive for coronavirus," it says.

"He was at his work in Mapo district attending a sexual harassment class. He contracted the virus from the instructor of the class."

A series of alerts then chronicle where the men had been, including a bar in the area until 11:03 at night.

These alerts arrive all day, every day, telling you where an infected person has been - and when. You can also look up the information on the Ministry of Health and Welfare website.

No names or addresses are given, but some people are still managing to connect the dots and identify people. The public has even decided two of the infected were having an affair.

And, even if patients are not outright identified, they're facing judgement - or ridicule - online.

When you search online for a virus patient's case number, related queries include "personal details", "face", "photo", "family" - or even "adultery".

Some online users are commenting that "I had no idea so many people go to love motels" - the by-the-hour hotels popular with couples.

They are also joking that people cheating on their spouses are known to be keeping a low profile these days.

One recent alert concerned a woman, aged 27, who works at the Samsung plant in Gumi. It said that at 11:30 at night on 18 February she visited her friend, who had attended the gathering of religious sect Shincheonji, the single biggest source of infections in the country.

City mayor Jang Se-yong further revealed her surname on Facebook. Panicked Gumi residents commented on his post: "Tell us the name of her apartment building."

"Please do not spread my personal information," the woman later wrote on Facebook.

"I am so sorry for my family and friends who would get hurt, and it's too hard for me psychologically, more than (physical pain)."

South Korean laws on managing and publicly sharing information on patients of infectious diseases changed significantly after the Mers outbreak in 2015.

South Korea had the second-largest number of Mers cases after Saudi Arabia. At the time, the government was criticised for withholding information, such as where the patients had been.

After that, the laws were amended to empower investigators.

"We know that it is [in the] the territory of important personal data," Goh Jae-young, an official at the Korea Centers for Disease Control Prevention, told BBC Korean.

"At first we interview the patients and try to gather information, emphasising that this affects the health and safety of the entire people.

"Then to fill in the areas they perhaps haven't told us, and also to verify, we use GPS data, surveillance camera footage, and credit card transactions to recreate their route a day before their symptoms showed."

Mr Goh emphasises that they do not reveal every place a patient has been.

"We share with the public only places where there was close contact or infections could have spread - like where there are many people, where the patient was known to have not worn a mask."

Sometimes they have to reveal the name of specific store, too - which leads to closure for certain time and financial loss to the business owner.

South Korea has had more than 5,000 confirmed case of Covid-19 and more than 30 deaths.

But with most cases not leading to serious health problems, South Koreans now dread stigma as much as they fear the virus itself.

A research team at Seoul National University's Graduate School of Public Health recently asked 1,000 Koreans which scares them the most:

1. Potential carriers around them

2. Criticisms and further damage they may suffer from being infected

3. That they may not have symptoms yet have the virus

Prof You Myoung-soon's team found "criticisms and further damage" were more feared than having the virus.

A man who contracted the virus along with his mother, wife and two children wrote an emotional, lengthy post on Facebook asking people to stop blaming them.

"I didn't know my mother was a follower of Shincheonji [church]," he wrote. He went on to defend his wife, a nurse, who had been criticised for visiting so many places during her incubation period.

The husband said her job was to accompany people with physical disabilities to clinics for appointments, and she had no idea she had the virus.

"It is true my wife moved around a lot, but please stop cursing her. Her only fault is marrying someone like me, and having to work and take care of the children."

What do I need to know about the coronavirus?

Doctors warn that online pursuit of patients could have very serious consequences. Malicious comments online have long been a problem in South Korea, and in some cases have led to suicide.

Lee Su-young, a psychiatrist at Myongji Hospital in Goyang, Gyeonggi, told BBC Korean that some of her patients "were more afraid of being blamed than dying of the virus".

"Many have told me repeatedly 'someone I know got infected because of me,' [or] 'the person is quarantined because of me.'"

It was at Myongji Hospital that the two people accused of being in adulterous relationship were treated. One is known to have high levels of anxiety and suffered sleep deprivation due to online comments.

As the virus spreads rapidly, it's vital that the public are giving the information they need to protect themselves and others.

But Dr Lee says the public needs to remain mature with this information - otherwise "people who fear being judged will hide and this will put everyone in further danger".

Mr Goh, from the Korea Centers for Disease Control Prevention says this is the first time the government has given quite so much information about each individual affected.

''After the spread of virus ends," he says, "there has to be society's assessment whether or not this was effective and appropriate."

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'At a love motel': Are S Korea virus alerts too revealing?

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As South Korea battles a snowballing number of Covid-19 cases, the government is letting people know if they were in the vicinity of a patient. But the volume of information has led to some awkward moments and now there is as much fear of social stigma as of illness, as Hyung Eun Kim of BBC News Korean reports.

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"The apps rely on a combination of self-reporting by the user and government information, including a person’s medical records, their travel history and if they have been in contact with someone diagnosed with Covid-19."

"The apps have become an integral part of Chinese authorities’ management of people and their movements in and out of affected areas."

"It draws on medical information including “symptoms (such as fever, cough), medical treatment, isolated observation, contact information, travel history of the epidemic area, and the user’s travel history including the mode of travel and what seat they sat in, and details on the vehicle and its driver."

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As millions of people in China emerge from weeks of lockdown, their freedom of movement is largely dependent on phone apps.

The "health code" service - run on the ubiquitous platforms Alipay and WeChat and developed for the Chinese government - give users colour-coded designations based on their health status and travel history, and a QR code that can be scanned by authorities.

The apps are specific to each city or province, but generally people given a green code are allowed to travel relatively freely. A yellow code indicates that the holder should be in home isolation, and a red code says the user is a confirmed Covid-19 patient and should be in quarantine.

The apps have become an integral part of Chinese authorities' management of people and their movements in and out of affected areas. When lockdown restrictions in Hubei province were lifted last week, the government allowed residents with a green code to travel within and out of the province.

Some restaurants, shops, hotels and other establishments ask for patrons to show their codes before entering. In Wuhan, only those with a green health code are allowed to take public transport.

However, the technology has raised concerns about their reach into people's private lives and data.

There have been complaints by Chinese social media users about a lack of transparency over how the app works and what data it is storing. Some have reported being unable to change erroneous "red" designations, and questioned the reliance on internet connection and surveillance.

"Why should you let companies such as Alipay and WeChat monitor and trace you with the health code?" said one user.

"Can't it be integrated into the chip of our ID card? And some people's mobile phones are not connected to the internet. I don't know what leaders are thinking?"

The apps rely on a combination of self-reporting by the user and government information, including a person's medical records, their travel history and if they have been in contact with someone diagnosed with Covid-19.

According to screenshots of an English-language version of the Alipay app, applicants are asked for contact and passport details and recent travel, and for relevant medical certification. Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba that operates Alipay, said that it does not provide or operate the service and has no access to the data entered into it. The company said it provided technical support to the Hangzhou city government when it was developing its version of the software.

Official guidelines for the WeChat app say it takes basic identity and address details as well as "the history of close contact with suspected patients, history of travel and residence outside the resident".

It draws on medical information including "symptoms (such as fever, cough), medical treatment, isolated observation, contact information, travel history of the epidemic area", and the user's travel history including the mode of travel and what seat they sat in, and details on the vehicle and its driver.

The health code app, launched in Hangzhou in early February, and described by state media as "Alipay Health code" spread to more than 100 cities within a week before it was rolled out nationally.
Additional reporting by Pei Lin Wu. Topics

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China's coronavirus health code apps raise concerns over privacy

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As millions of people in China emerge from weeks of lockdown, their freedom of movement is largely dependent on phone apps. The "health code" service - run on the ubiquitous platforms Alipay and WeChat and developed for the Chinese government - give users colour-coded designations based on their health status and travel history, and a QR code that can be scanned by authorities.

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Tweet showing video of people demonstrating their QR codes before entering the subway

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Tweet showing video of people demonstrating their QR codes before entering the subway

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck.

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck. https://t.co/rettbnhbWW

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
The police part is a big step. Firms like Ali often share data with gov't, but there’s a process. In this case, the moment a user grants permissions, it runs a function “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice.” That's a new level of police tracking embedded in a hugely popular app. https://t.co/ZD3gGy7p9f

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Effectively, the app is required now to do anything in many places. Here's what it looks like trying to get onto the subway in Hangzhou. Overnight the city went from lockdown to relying on the app. If your code is green, you can ride. If you're given yellow or red, you're stuck. pic.twitter.com/rettbnhbWW
— Paul Mozur 孟建國 (@paulmozur) March 2, 2020

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"the system does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk. It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides."

"as soon as a user grants the software access to personal data, a piece of the program labeled “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” sends the person’s location, city name and an identifying code number to a server"

"Zhou Jiangyong, Hangzhou’s Communist Party secretary, recently called the health code system “an important practice in Hangzhou’s digitally empowered city management”

"each time a person’s code is scanned — at a health checkpoint, for instance — his or her current location appears to be sent to the system’s servers. This could allow the authorities to track people’s movements over time."

"The Alipay Health Code’s creators say it uses big data to draw automated conclusions about whether someone is a contagion risk."

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Europe is now the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Case counts and deaths are soaring in Italy, Spain, France, and Germany, and many countries have imposed lockdowns and closed borders. Meanwhile, the United States, hampered by a fiasco with delayed and faulty test kits, is just guessing at its COVID-19 burden, though experts believe it is on the same trajectory as countries in Europe.

Amid these dire trends, South Korea has emerged as a sign of hope and a model to emulate. The country of 50 million appears to have greatly slowed its epidemic; it reported only 74 new cases today, down from 909 at its peak on 29 February. And it has done so without locking down entire cities or taking some of the other authoritarian measures that helped China bring its epidemic under control. "South Korea is a democratic republic, we feel a lockdown is not a reasonable choice," says Kim Woo-Joo, an infectious disease specialist at Korea University. South Korea's success may hold lessons for other countries-and also a warning: Even after driving case numbers down, the country is braced for a resurgence.

Behind its success so far has been the most expansive and well-organized testing program in the world, combined with extensive efforts to isolate infected people and trace and quarantine their contacts. South Korea has tested more than 270,000 people, which amounts to more than 5200 tests per million inhabitants-more than any other country except tiny Bahrain, according to the Worldometer website. The United States has so far carried out 74 tests per 1 million inhabitants, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.

South Korea's experience shows that "diagnostic capacity at scale is key to epidemic control," says Raina MacIntyre, an emerging infectious disease scholar at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. "Contact tracing is also very influential in epidemic control, as is case isolation," she says.

Yet whether the success will hold is unclear. New case numbers are declining largely because the herculean effort to investigate a massive cluster of more than 5000 cases-60% of the nation's total-linked to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive, messianic megachurch, is winding down. But because of that effort, "We have not looked hard in other parts of Korea," says Oh Myoung-Don, an infectious disease specialist at Seoul National University.

New clusters are now appearing. Since last week, authorities have reported 129 new infections, most linked to a Seoul call center. "This could be the initiation of community spread," through Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi province, Kim says. The region is home to 23 million people.

Lessons from MERS

South Korea learned the importance of preparedness the hard way. In 2015, a South Korean businessman came down with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) after returning from a visit to three Middle Eastern countries. He was treated at three South Korean health facilities before he was diagnosed with MERS and isolated. By then, he had set off a chain of transmission that infected 186 and killed 36, including many patients hospitalized for other ailments, visitors, and hospital staff. Tracing, testing, and quarantining nearly 17,000 people quashed the outbreak after 2 months. The specter of a runaway epidemic alarmed the nation and dented the economy.

"That experience showed that laboratory testing is essential to control an emerging infectious disease," Kim says. In addition, Oh says, "The MERS experience certainly helped us to improve hospital infection prevention and control." So far, there are no reports of infections of COVID-19 among South Korean health care workers, he says.

Legislation enacted since then gave the government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card, and other data from those who test positive to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. That information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person.

After the novel coronavirus emerged in China, Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) raced to develop its tests and cooperated with diagnostic manufacturers to develop commercial test kits. The first test was approved on 7 February, when the country had just a few cases, and distributed to regional health centers. Just 11 days later, a 61-year-old woman, known as "Case 31," tested positive. She had attended 9 and 16 February services at the Shincheonji megachurch in Daegu, about 240 kilometers southeast of Seoul, already feeling slightly ill. Upward of 500 attendees sit shoulder to shoulder on the floor of the church during 2-hour services, according to local news reports.

The country identified more than 2900 new cases just in the next 12 days, the vast majority Shincheonji members. On 29 February alone, KCDC reported more than 900 new cases, bringing the cumulative total to 3150 and making the outbreak the largest by far outside mainland China. The surge initially overwhelmed testing capabilities and KCDC's 130 disease detectives couldn't keep up, Kim says. Contact tracing efforts were concentrated on the Shincheonji cluster, in which 80% of those reporting respiratory symptoms proved positive, compared with only 10% in other clusters.

High-risk patients with underlying illnesses get priority for hospitalization, Chun says. Those with moderate symptoms are sent to repurposed corporate training facilities and spaces provided by public institutions, where they get basic medical support and observation. Those who recover and test negative twice are released. Close contacts and those with minimal symptoms whose family members are free of chronic diseases and who can measure their own temperatures are ordered to self-quarantine for 2 weeks. A local monitoring team calls twice daily to make sure the quarantined stay put and to ask about symptoms. Quarantine violators face up to 3 million won ($2500) fines. If a recent bill becomes law, the fine will go up to 10 million won and as much as a year in jail.

In spite of the efforts, the Daegu-Gyeongbuk region ran out of space for the seriously ill. Four people isolated at home, waiting for hospital beds, were rushed to emergency rooms when their conditions deteriorated, only to die there, according to local media.

Still, the numbers of new cases have dropped the past 2 weeks, aided by voluntary social distancing, both in the Daegu-Gyeongbuk region and nationwide. The government advised people to wear masks, wash their hands, avoid crowds and meetings, work remotely, and to join online religious services instead of going to churches. Those with fevers or respiratory illnesses are urged to stay home and watch their symptoms for 3 to 4 days. "People were shocked by the Shincheonji cluster," Chun says, which boosted compliance. Less than 1 month after Case 31 emerged, "The cluster is coming under control," Oh says.

Yet new clusters are emerging, and for 20% of confirmed cases, it's unclear how they became infected, suggesting there is still undetected community spread. "As long as this uncertainty remains, we cannot say that the outbreak has peaked," Chun says.

More data needed

The government hopes to control new clusters in the same way it confronted the one in Shincheonji. The national testing capacity has reached a staggering 15,000 tests per day. There are 43 drive-through testing stations nationwide, a concept now copied in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the first week of March, the Ministry of the Interior also rolled out a smartphone app that can track the quarantined and collect data on symptoms.

Chun Byung-Chul, an epidemiologist at Korea University, says scientists are eager to see more epidemiological data. "We are literally stamping our feet," Chun says. KCDC releases the basic counts of patients, their age and gender, and how many are linked to clusters. "That is not enough," Chun says. He and others would like to study detailed individual patient data, which would enable epidemiologists to model the outbreak and determine the number of new infections triggered by each case, also known as the basic reproductive number or R ₀; the time from infection to the onset of symptoms; and whether early diagnosis improved patients' outcomes. (South Korea has had 75 deaths so far, an unusually low mortality rate, although the fact that Shincheonji church members are mostly young may have contributed.) Chun says a group of epidemiologists and scientists has proposed partnering with KCDC to gather and share such information, "and we are waiting for their response."

Kim says medical doctors are also planning to share details of the clinical features of COVID-19 cases in the country in forthcoming publications. "We hope our experience will help other countries control this COVID-19 outbreak."
With reporting by Ahn Mi-Young in Seoul.

doi:10.1126/science.abb7566

Dennis Normile is a contributing correspondent in Shanghai, China.

More from News

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Coronavirus cases have dropped sharply in South Korea. What's the secret to its success?

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Europe is now the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Case counts and deaths are soaring in Italy, Spain, France, and Germany, and many countries have imposed lockdowns and closed borders. Meanwhile, the United States, hampered by a fiasco with delayed and faulty test kits, is just guessing at its COVID-19 burden, though experts believe it is on the same trajectory as countries in Europe.

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"When we go out or stay in a hotel, we can feel a pair of eyes looking at us at any time. We are completely exposed to the monitoring of the government”

"The virus is likely to be a catalyst for a further expansion of the surveillance regime, as major events like the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing or the Shanghai Expo in 2010 were. “The techniques of mass surveillance became more permanent after these events"

“With the coronavirus outbreak the idea of risk scoring and restrictions on movement quickly became reality,” she said. “Over time we see more and more intrusive use of technology and less ability of people to push back.”

"One resident complained on Weibo that he had driven through Hubei without stopping but his colour code changed to yellow from green, indicating he would need to be quarantined. “I can’t even go out to buy bread or water,” another in Jiangsu province said, after his code inexplicably changed to yellow following a work trip."

"Many described the app as “for appearances,” or xingshi zhuyi, a way for lower level officials to impress their higher ups with added strictures on citizens."

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Over the last two months, Chinese citizens have had to adjust to a new level of government intrusion.

Getting into one's apartment compound or workplace requires scanning a QR code, writing down one's name and ID number, temperature and recent travel history. Telecom operators track people's movements while social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo have hotlines for people to report others who may be sick. Some cities are offering people rewards for informing on sick neighbours.

Chinese companies are meanwhile rolling out facial recognition technology that can detect elevated temperatures in a crowd or flag citizens not wearing a face mask. A range of apps use the personal health information of citizens to alert others of their proximity to infected patients or whether they have been in close contact.

State authorities, in addition to locking down entire cities, have implemented a myriad of security measures in the name of containing the coronavirus outbreak. From top officials to local community workers, those enforcing the rules repeat the same refrain: this is an "extraordinary time" feichang shiqi, requiring extraordinary measures.

As the number of new infections in China falls, having infected more than 80,000 and killed more than 3,000, residents and observers question how much of these new measures are here to stay.
Chinese social media censoring 'officially sanctioned facts' on coronavirus
"I don't know what will happen when the epidemic is over. I don't dare imagine it," said Chen Weiyu, 23, who works in Shanghai. Every day when Chen goes to work, she has to submit a daily health check to her company, as well as scan a QR code and register in order to enter the office park.

"Monitoring is already everywhere. The epidemic has just made that monitoring, which we don't normally see during ordinary times, more obvious," she said.

Others are more emphatic about the future. Wang Aizhong, an activist based in Guangzhou, said: "This epidemic undoubtedly provides more reason for the government to surveil the public. I don't think authorities will rule out keeping this up after the outbreak."

"When we go out or stay in a hotel, we can feel a pair of eyes looking at us at any time. We are completely exposed to the monitoring of the government," he said.

Experts say the virus, which emerged in Wuhan in December, has given authorities a pretext for accelerating the mass collection of personal data to track citizens, a dangerous prospect given that the country does not have stringent laws governing personal data.

"It's mission creep," said Maya Wang, senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch. According to Wang, the virus is likely to be a catalyst for a further expansion of the surveillance regime, as major events like the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing or the Shanghai Expo in 2010 were. "The techniques of mass surveillance became more permanent after these events," she said.

"With the coronavirus outbreak the idea of risk scoring and restrictions on movement quickly became reality," she said. "Over time we see more and more intrusive use of technology and less ability of people to push back."

Many Chinese residents see the extra layers of public monitoring as additional bureaucratic hurdles, more frustrating than sinister, that further demonstrate the government's ineffectiveness in handling the outbreak.

China's surveillance dragnet, while proudly promoted by officials, is full of loopholes. An ex-inmate infected with the virus managed to travel from Wuhan to Beijing last month, well after quarantine measures had gone into effect, prompting widespread criticism over how she left.

Citizens are particularly critical of a system called Health Code, which users can sign up for through Alipay or WeChat, that assigns individuals one of three colour codes based on their travel history, time spent in outbreak hotspots and exposure to potential carriers of the virus. The software, used in more than 100 cities, will soon allow people to check the colours of other residents when their ID numbers are entered.

One resident complained on Weibo that he had driven through Hubei without stopping but his colour code changed to yellow from green, indicating he would need to be quarantined. "I can't even go out to buy bread or water," another in Jiangsu province said, after his code inexplicably changed to yellow following a work trip.

Many described the app as "for appearances," or xingshi zhuyi, a way for lower level officials to impress their higher ups with added strictures on citizens.

"I have a health code, a pass for my residential compound, and another certificate of health and still I can't get into my home," one commentator said. "This is garbage. Please release us regular people," another said.
It's like being in a science fiction film - my daily life in a locked-down Chinese city | Mark Bishop
Low-tech security measures have been employed as much as high-tech ones. An army of workers guard entry points to public spaces, ordering pedestrians to log their information or questioning residents about their recent movements. Religious sites like mosques have been closed. Many cities and counties have banned group gatherings, including small dinner parties.

In February, Sichuan province officials broke up a group playing mahjong party and forced the participants to read out an apology, captured on video. "We were wrong. We promise there will not be a next time and we will also monitor others," the group of 10 men said, heads slightly bowed.

Other videos posted online have shown local officials pushing residents to the ground for not wearing a face mask or tying a man to a pole. Local law enforcement in Wuhan were recently fired after a video of them beating a man for selling vegetables on the street was posted online.

An article by the official state news agency Xinhua last week reminded citizens that those who violate virus prevention and control measures could be subject to three years in prison, and up to seven for particularly serious cases, as outlined in China's criminal code.
China cracks down on 'sexual innuendo' and 'celebrity gossip' in new censorship rules
"Intrusive surveillance is already the 'new normal'. The question for China is what, if any, is a level of surveillance that the population refuses to tolerate," said Stuart Hargreaves, an associate professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong's law school, focusing on privacy and information law.

Some worry current measures will continue in part because citizens are growing accustomed to them. Alex Zhang, 28, who lives in Chengdu, refers to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's theory on the state of exception, and how measures taken during a state of emergency can be prolonged.

"This type of governance and thinking for dealing with the epidemic can also be used for other issues - like the media, citizen journalists or ethnic conflicts. Because this method has been used before, citizens will accept it. It becomes normal," he said.
Topics Additional reporting by Lillian Yang

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'The new normal': China's excessive coronavirus public monitoring could be here to stay

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Over the last two months, Chinese citizens have had to adjust to a new level of government intrusion. Getting into one's apartment compound or workplace requires scanning a QR code, writing down one's name and ID number, temperature and recent travel history.

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https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1234313932862418944?lang=en

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"In the southern province of Guangdong, local authorities said residents must register with their real names when purchasing fever and cough medications at pharmacies so that officials can follow up with them. In the tech hub of Shenzhen, commuters have recently been asked to provide their full names before they can use the subway."

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Coronavirus boosts China's big data push but privacy still a concern

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China is scooping up more data amid the coronavirus outbreak, raising concerns about privacy though most willing to put public safety first until the crisis ends

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"The Corona 100m app, as its name implies, alerts users if they breach a 100-meter (328-foot) radius of the latest tracked whereabouts of the coronavirus patient. Since its launch, the app has been downloaded more than 1 million times..."

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Croatia, where I live, reported its first coronavirus case Feb. 25. Since then, 68 more people have been infected, according to the U.S. Embassy in Croatia.

To keep track of the spread of the disease, I often visit official web pages, especially those of our government, as well as this amazing global outbreak tracker. However, I wish there were something better: An app that could let me know when a new patient is admitted and where - so I can steer clear.

One such app was created in South Korea by a local developer who wanted to visualize available official information, as well as add useful options. At press time, there were 8,320 active cases of COVID-19 in South Korea. The Corona 100m app, as its name implies, alerts users if they breach a 100-meter (328-foot) radius of the latest tracked whereabouts of the coronavirus patient. Since its launch, the app has been downloaded more than 1 million times, and reviews have been overwhelmingly positive.

One would think that having apps and resources that provide information like this available to the public would be a good thing, but sadly, that's not always the case. Many new apps on Apple's App Store and Alphabet's Google Play Store have cropped up, trying to capitalize on the panic and spreading misinformation among the public.

That has pushed Apple to crack down on such apps, limiting approval only to those published by recognized institutions, such as governments, hospitals or the World Health Organization (WHO). Alphabet is taking a somewhat different approach, it seems. Aside from banning apps, as Apple has, Alphabet has also removed "coronavirus" and "COVID-19" from its search results, while creating a special page within the Play Store that provides access to apps developed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Red Cross and Twitter .

The crackdown isn't limited to apps: Amazon is trying to weed out products that claim to provide a cure or protection against the coronavirus and COVID-19, as well as limit price gouging of protective gear such as face masks. Prices of those items have tripled and quadrupled in response to the buying frenzy incited by global panic. Amazon urged sellers to comply with its Fair Pricing Policy, and the company last week banned two brothers who sought to resell 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer.

Facebook , Instagram and Twitter have started swinging the ban hammer on misleading ads, especially those that claim to provide goods that can prevent or cure the illness, as well as those designed to incite panic to gain views. Fear-mongering and misinformation-stifling isn't limited to ads, according to Facebook reps, who said content is monitored as well.

While those measures are commendable and almost necessary in an age where social media rules (and is by and large responsible for) the flow of global information, one can't but wonder what would happen if those same social media giants abused their power and facilitated a different flow of (mis)information and apps concerning any topic they deem valuable for their own ends?

I guess it's good that the gods of tech and social media have chosen to be on our side in this time of turmoil.
Jurica Dujmovic is a MarketWatch columnist.

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Wildly popular coronavirus-tracker app helps South Koreans steer clear of outbreak areas

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Croatia, where I live, reported its first coronavirus case Feb. 25. Since then, 68 more people have been infected, according to the U.S. Embassy in Croatia. To keep track of the spread of the disease, I often visit official web pages, especially those of our government, as well as this amazing global outbreak tracker.

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"Officials said it is intended to help manage the increasing case load and prevent cases of “super spreaders,” who have been blamed for significant numbers of infections."

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Skip to Content

Thousands in coronavirus lockdown will be monitored for symptoms-and tracked to make sure they stay at home and don't become "super spreaders."

More than 30,000 people currently ordered to stay in isolation

Concern over infected 'super spreaders' breaking quarantine

With almost 6,300 cases and more than 40 reported deaths, South Korea has become home to the world's largest coronavirus outbreak outside China. As a result, the government in Seoul has taken what it calls "maximum" action to contain the spread of the disease-including sending thousands of people into mandatory home quarantine.

Now it is launching its latest attempt to keep things from escalating further: a smartphone app that can monitor citizens on lockdown.

The app, developed by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, allows those who have been ordered not to leave home to stay in contact with case workers and report on their progress. It will also use GPS to keep track of their location to make sure they are not breaking their quarantine.

Named "self-quarantine safety protection," the sparsely designed service is being launched today for Android smartphones, while an iPhone version is expected to be released on March 20. Officials said it is intended to help manage the increasing case load and prevent cases of "super spreaders," who have been blamed for significant numbers of infections.

Lockdown rules

Under current guidelines from the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anyone who has come into contact with a confirmed coronavirus carrier is subject to a mandatory two-week self-quarantine. "Contact" is defined as having been within two meters of a confirmed carrier, or having been in the same room where a confirmed patient has coughed.

Once self-quarantine subjects receive an order from their local medical center, they are legally prohibited from leaving their quarantine areas-usually their homes-and are instructed to maintain strict separation from other people, including family members. Those in lockdown are assigned to a local government case officer, who checks in twice a day by phone to track the development of any symptoms, and mobile testing teams are deployed to collect samples if things escalate.

Now those in quarantine can use the app to report their symptoms and provide status updates to officials. And if they venture outside their designated quarantine area, an alert will be sent to both the subject and the case officer.

The GPS tracking reflects a nationwide sense of urgency that spiked in mid-February after a 61-year-old woman known as "Patient 31" became a "super spreader" when she displayed coronavirus symptoms but ignored medical advice and refused to be tested. Instead, she continued with her daily routine, including visiting a buffet and attending her regular church services. She wound up infecting a number of other people in the city of Daegu.

Today Daegu and the surrounding province of North Gyeongsang make up the largest coronavirus cluster in South Korea by a large margin. The vast majority of the country's cases are in the region, and nearly 70% of those have been traced back to the Shincheonji Church.

"More efficient"

"The number of self-quarantined people nationwide has reached around 30,000, and there is a limit to the human resources available to local governments to monitor these people," said Jung Chang-hyun, the ministry official who supervised development of the app. "The app is a support service aimed at making this more efficient."

The app is not mandatory, and because some people may have difficulty downloading or using it, the current system of monitoring through traditional telephone calls will continue. Others can simply opt out.

Equally, officials say they are taking a flexible approach to GPS tracking rather than draconian enforcement.

"People can wander out of their quarantine areas intentionally as well as by mistake," said Jung. "But because there is a risk of secondary infection either way, we hope that the app can help block these unnecessary incidents in a more organized way."

While he did not disclose the app's radius of movement restriction, Jung said that the ministry is taking into account the fallibility of GPS tracking.

The app joins a repertoire of other measures launched to combat the surge of new cases in South Korea, such as drive-through coronavirus testing stations, which contribute to the country's roughly 15,000-a-day testing capacity. Enabled by the KCDC's policy of rigorous transparency, a slew of privately developed map services tracking confirmed carriers have also emerged, while municipal and district governments are sending regular emergency alerts to people's phones to inform them of any new coronavirus cases.

This wealth of data has occasionally taken on a darker aspect. Online witch-hunts looking to identify and out coronavirus carriers have created an atmosphere of social fear. So have leaks of patient information, some of which has been proved to be entirely false.

"We are trying to minimize these risks by making it so that only the parties in question-the quarantine subject or the government official assigned to them-can access the app," said Jung. "We will be thinking of ways to improve the app as we use it in the coming weeks."

He added that the South Korean government would be prepared to share its technology with other nations that requested it. "We haven't had other countries ask for our help by sharing it yet, but if they were to, we absolutely would," he said.

* An earlier version of this article said the app was first being launched in North Gyeongsang province. It was, in fact, rolled out nationwide.

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South Korea is watching quarantined citizens with a smartphone app

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With almost 6,300 cases and more than 40 reported deaths, South Korea has become home to the world's largest coronavirus outbreak outside China. As a result, the government in Seoul has taken what it calls "maximum" action to contain the spread of the disease-including sending thousands of people into mandatory home quarantine.

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"Digital exclusion in general reflects and entrenches broader patterns of disadvantage across age, gender, social and economic dimensions,” said Julian Thomas, a communications professor at Australia’s RMIT University. “The cost of internet access can be prohibitive for low-income families and the infrastructure and services necessary for everyone to be able to use the internet at home is unevenly distributed across urban, rural and remote areas.”

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Millions of children in Asia are at risk from falling behind in their studies due to school closures amid the coronavirus outbreak, with unequal access to the internet 'hurting' poorer kids as classes go online, technology and human rights experts have warned.

According to data released by the United Nations' (UN) education agency UNESCO, an unprecedented 363m children and young people worldwide are already being affected by the closures of schools and universities.

This number is expected to soar as more countries implement lockdowns. The Philippine capital of Manila has become the latest Asian city to go on lockdown, committing to a month of school closures and community quarantining to contain the spread of the virus.

"The global scale and speed of the current educational disruption are unparalleled and, if prolonged, could threaten the right to education," Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO's director-general, warned in a statement. As countries deal with the global health crisis, it is important to "ensure this crisis promotes innovation and inclusion and does not exacerbate learning inequalities," she added.

As a result of the lockdowns, many schools are deploying distance-learning programmes and education applications and platforms, including the use of radio and the internet to reach students remotely.

However, the so-called "digital divide" - which refers to the gap between those who have access to computers and the internet and those with limited or no access - remains a challenge.

Around 54 per cent of the global population, or 4.1 billion people, use the internet. Yet only two out of 10 in the least developed countries are online, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN's internet and telecoms agency.

"Digital exclusion in general reflects and entrenches broader patterns of disadvantage across age, gender, social and economic dimensions," said Julian Thomas, a communications professor at Australia's RMIT University. "The cost of internet access can be prohibitive for low-income families and the infrastructure and services necessary for everyone to be able to use the internet at home is unevenly distributed across urban, rural and remote areas."

Thomas added that low-income families are particularly dependent on mobile devices for internet access, which may not be suited for learning purposes. Such families also tend to rely on schools, libraries, workplaces and community centres for internet access and are "substantially disadvantaged" when these are closed.

Education charities have said they are worried about girls dropping out of school in India, where primary schools in Delhi and schools and colleges in Kerala state are closed until April to fight the spread of the virus. According to census data, nearly a fourth of the country's girls leave school before puberty and that the female literacy rate in the country is 66 per cent compared to 80 per cent for men.

In Delhi, the closure coincides with the holiday period. If it extends beyond 31 March, then parents may be involved in lessons and some classes may be moved online, said Shailendra Sharma, principal advisor at the directorate of education in India.

"We recognise that in government schools, many students are first-generation learners, so parents may not be able to help much. Nor does every student have access to a smartphone or tablet," he said. "There may be challenges if the shutdown lasts longer."

Yesterday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee published an open letter, saying that the web is "not working" for women, as they are being made to feel increasingly unwelcome online, with abuse and gender discrimination rife.

Sign up to the E&T News e-mail to get great stories like this delivered to your inbox every day.

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Coronavirus deepening digital divide amongst Asian schoolchildren

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Millions of children in Asia are at risk from falling behind in their studies due to school closures amid the coronavirus outbreak, with unequal access to the internet 'hurting' poorer kids as classes go online, technology and human rights experts have warned.

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"Those who want to enter public spaces should have green codes and show them to watchmen, which means they are healthy enough to move around the city."

"People taking public transport vehicles, such as taxis, buses and subways, are also required to show their green health codes."

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Man uses drone to persuade villagers to wear masks in China

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taken from: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/28/tech/korea-coronavirus-tracking-apps/index.html

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"Holed up at home and unable to concentrate on her work, Ms. Wong is feeling helpless. She cannot help noticing that the system encourages a kind of regional prejudice. “It divides people up based on where they’re from,” she said. “Isn’t that discrimination?”

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Cutting-edge technology! A Chinese community worker uses a drone to measure the temperature of residents and avoid face-to-face visits during #coronavirus outbreak. People need to stand in their balcony to get their temperature checked. pic.twitter.com/TE1L3xLtab
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 3, 2020

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S. Korea tracking coronavirus spread using detailed 'contact tracing' map

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Man uses drone to persuade villagers to wear masks in China