Big Brother or Right Time for Big Data Tech: How Did China and Taiwan Succeed in Containing Coronavirus
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Huge data sets analyzed computationally reveal patterns, trends, and correlations in all fields, from defense through marketing to health. Big data methods have been playing a crucial role in the current global coronavirus crisis, helping monitor the spread of the virus and contain it. In fact, today public health officials have at their disposal an array of powerful data collection and analytics techniques that previous generations lacked.
The case of Taiwan is an interesting example. Taiwan was expected to be hard hit by the coronavirus, due to its proximity and the number of flights between the island nation and its massive neighbor to the west. Yet it has so far managed to prevent the coronavirus from heavily impacting its 23 million citizens, despite hundreds of thousands of them working and residing in China.
In addition to a robust pandemic prevention plan put into place at the 2003 SARS outbreak, Taiwan has used several big data methods. First, it integrated its national health insurance database with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics. This allowed the generation of real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms.
According to Stanford Health Policy’s Jason Wang, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine with PhD in policy analysis, Taipei also used Quick Response (QR) code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers’ infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the last 14 days. People who had not traveled to high-risk areas were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS for faster immigration clearance; those who had traveled to high-risk areas were
quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phones to ensure that they stayed home during the incubation period, according to fsi.stanford.edu.
China has also been using big data collection and artificial intelligence to curb potential coronavirus infection to spread further. Greater data collection has helped prevent the virus from spreading in China because it enables precise reporting of hotspots.
As stated by China’s National Health Commission (NHC), they are ”using big data technology to track the epidemic in real-time, review priorities (cases), and effectively predict.”
The Chinese government is also working on strengthening the information link between the departments of public, security and traffic, as reported by internetsearchinc.com.
Misleading the Chinese authorities about your travel history to avoid a mandatory quarantine order has also become a lot harder thanks to a verification system operated by the three state-run telecommunications providers.
Qihoo 360, China’s biggest cybersecurity company, is offering an app that lets users check if they have been on a train or plane with someone who contracted the virus.
The question is to what extent would will the world be able to contain the virus through data analytics, and where is the line between privacy and the attempt to know everything about citizens’ travel routes.
Interested in learning more about the latest data technologies? Attend i-HLS’ InnoTech Expo in Tel Aviv – Israel’s largest innovation, HLS, and cyber technologies expo – on November 18-19, 2020 at Expo Tel Aviv, Pavilion 2.
