The Economist UK - 28.03.2020

20 BriefingThe pandemic and the state The EconomistMarch 28th 2020

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them and alerts the authorities. Leaving

quarantine without your phone can incur a

fine; in South Korea fines for breaking

quarantine are hefty, and will soon be ac-

companied by the threat of prison.

Phones need not just send data back to

the government; they can also pass data on

to third parties. China’s Health Check app,

developed by provincial governments and

run through portals in the ubiquitous pay-

ment apps Alipay and WeChat, takes self-

reported data about places visited and

symptoms to generate an identifying qr

code that is displayed in green, orange or

red, corresponding to free movement, sev-

en-day and 14-day quarantines. It is not

clear how accurate the system is, but Alipay

says people in more than 200 cities are now

using their Health Check status to move

more freely.

Cellular biology

A group of academics, developers and pub-

lic-health officials from the World Health

Organisation (who) and elsewhere are

building a similar who MyHealth app.

When reliable tests for immunity—wheth-

er gained through infection or, one day,

vaccination—become available, such doc-

umentation apps may be used to commu-

nicate their results in some places, too.

When it comes to helping with model-

ling and situational awareness, there is a

wealth of data. Phone companies know

roughly where all their mobile customers

are from what cell their phones are using.

And because advertisers will pay to tailor

ads, internet companies such as Byte-

dance, Facebook, Google and Tencent gath-

er scads of data about what their billions of

users are doing where. Modellers can use

data from both kinds of company to fine-

tune predictions of the spread of disease.

Governments can use the same data to

check how their policies are performing at

a district or city level. In Germany Deutsche

Telekom has provided data to the Robert

Koch Institute, the government’s public-

health agency, in an aggregated form which

does not identify individuals. The British

government is in talks with cell-phone car-

riers about similar data access. It could

simply require it: the Investigatory Powers

Act of 2016 gives it the power to take what-

ever data it wishes from any company

within its jurisdiction in order to fight the

virus, and to do so in secret. In practice, ne-

gotiation and openness make more sense.

The belief that personal data are being

passed to the government in secret could

erode exactly the sort of trust on which an

“all in it together” fight, as called for by Bo-

ris Johnson, the prime minister, depends.

Google, which may well have more in-

formation about where people are than any

other company around, says that it is ex-

ploring ways in which it could help model-

lers and governments with aggregated

data. One example could be helping health

authorities determine the impact of social

distancing using the sort of data that allow

Google Maps to tell users about how con-

gested streets or museums are.

Computational social scientists, who

use data from digital systems to study hu-

man behaviour, are mulling over other

ways that this kind of data might inform

and improve epidemiological models. One

problem with current models, says Sune

Lehmann of the University of Copenhagen,

is that they assume that people mix and in-

teract in a uniform manner; that passing a

friend and a stranger in the street is exactly

the same sort of interaction. His research

group has written machine-learning soft-

ware which can sift through historical re-

cords from mobile-phone providers to di-

agnose and explore how relationships

modulate such interactions. Applied to

current data this understanding might

show that interactions between friends in

coffee shops are not that important for the

spread of disease, but that the delivery of

packages is—or vice versa. During an ex-

tended pandemic, such information could,

if reliable, be a great help to policymakers

trying to keep bits of the economy running.

The use of data becomes most fraught

when it moves beyond modelling and in-

forming policy to the direct tracking of in-

dividuals in order to see from whom they

got the disease. Such contact-tracing can be

an important public-health tool. It also has

a resemblance to modern counter-terro-

rism tactics. “The technology to track and

trace already exists and is being used by

governments all around the world,” says

Mike Bracken, a partner at Public Digital, a

consultancy, and former boss of the British

government’s digital services. To what ex-

tent those capabilities are now part of the

fight against covid-19, no one will say.

One reason governments keep secret

the procedures and powers by which they

seize and make use of data is a concern that

informed enemies would thus evade them.

When it comes to public health, this is un-

convincing. Complex as it is by the stan-

dards of rna-based viruses, sars-cov-2 is

not going to change its behaviour because

of what the spooks are doing. But their ad-

versaries are not the only people that

spooks like to keep in the dark. Citizens

concerned with civil liberties fit the bill,

too. This is why Mr Bracken expects gov-

ernments not to be forthcoming about any

use they are making of such capabilities in

the fight against covid-19: to be frank

would, he says, “expose the power that gov-

ernments have very quickly”.

Apparently unworried about doing so,

on March 16th Israel’s government autho-

rised Shin Bet, the internal security service,

and the police to use their technical know-

how to track and access the mobile phones

of those who have been infected. Israel’s

High Court initially limited the powers;

after parliamentary oversight was estab-

lished, though, they were good to go.

South Korea, too, is using digital sys-

tems to ease the load on its human contact

tracers. At the beginning of the outbreak

the Korea Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention ran their requests for location

histories through the police, who used

their channels to data controllers to re-

trieve the required information. But the

Staying level

Sources: Johns Hopkins CSSE;The Economist

Confirmed covid-19 cases, since tenth case

2020, log scale

*Data for China begin at 548th case

10

100

1,

10,

100,

13 20

January February March

27 03 10 17 24 02 09 16 25

South Korea

China*

HongKong

Singapore

Taiwan

China records

its first death

Hubei

lockdown

Singapore bans

entry from China

Daegu cluster

discovered

27,000 tests

carried out

More people recover than

test positive for first time

Largest daily increase

in new cases (48,

mostly imported)

New cases inside China

fall below those outside

Premier Li Keqiang

announces that the virus

is controlled domestically

Taiwan activates

Central Epidemic

Command Centre Teachers and students banned from overseas travel

1

At home, grown

Population under full or partial lockdown, bn

2020

Source: Press reports

2

2.

2.

1.

1.

0.

0

Jan Feb Mar

48 cities and

four provinces

in China Italy

Spain

France, Malaysia

Britain

191m Americans

urged to stay

at home

India

Argentina, Jordan