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China Medicine

In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags (nytimes.com) 138

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
A new system uses software to dictate quarantines -- and appears to send personal data to police, in a troubling precedent for automated social control. From a report: As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens' lives -- by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. But a New York Times analysis of the software's code found that 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.

The Alipay Health Code, as China's official news media has called the system, was first introduced in the eastern city of Hangzhou -- a project by the local government with the help of Ant Financial, a sister company of the e-commerce giant Alibaba. People in China sign up through Ant's popular wallet app, Alipay, and are assigned a color code -- green, yellow or red -- that indicates their health status. The system is already in use in 200 cities and is being rolled out nationwide, Ant says. Neither the company nor Chinese officials have explained in detail how the system classifies people. That has caused fear and bewilderment among those who are ordered to isolate themselves and have no idea why.
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In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags More

In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags

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  • A brave new world (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @10:52AM (#59787272)
    When all is said and done it will be very interesting to compare China's draconian quarantines to America's more-or-less non-response. It is remarkable that China has managed to really slow the spread to one portion of their nation. It's really hard for me to imagine us considering any such thing unless the death toll exceeds a million or so.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      Indeed. Such an app is certainly authoritarian, but also probably effective. Since they can use GPS to track where people have gone, they should be able to immediately trace back who was likely exposed when a person is later diagnosed with the disease.

      I wonder if there could be a good way to implement this without the sort of privacy concerns (e.g. without broadcasting everyone's locations to the government)... Hmm, maybe via "pull" rather than "push"? That is, your locations are only saved on your device

    • When all is said and done it will be very interesting to compare China's draconian quarantines to America's more-or-less non-response.

      Yeah, it'll be interesting. So far, China (with 4x US population), has had 2500+ deaths, compared to the USA's two deaths. Of course, China had a big head start on body count, since they've had people dying since January (about 50 dead per day, average, so far), and our first (and second) death was this past weekend, I believe...

    • A brutal dictatorship is much more effective in imposing a quarantine than a free nation. Shocker...

      • A brutal dictatorship is much more effective in imposing a quarantine than a free nation. Shocker...

        Yea, that's a given.
        But which system will prevent the most deaths? I guess we will all wait and see.

        • It's hardly an apples to apples comparison, given all the other differences between the countries - general income, education, access to healthcare, population density, cultural behaviours and attitudes, lifestyle factors such as smoking, prevalence of pollution etc.

          • Sure there are other factors. All those things you mentioned would tend to favor the US wouldn't they? We could still learn something if after that America still does worse. Is quarantining enough to outweigh all those factors?
            I'm still curious.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      If you want to see a non-response in action, you need to look to Canada. The media and some members of federal and provincial governments are still calling quarantines xenophobic.

      • Re:A brave new world (Score:5, Interesting)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @01:03PM (#59788002)
        US to Canada will also be an interesting comparison. One anecdote, as of Friday, more coronavirus tests had been administered in British Columbia alone (population 5m) than in all of the United States.

        https://globalnews.ca/news/661... [globalnews.ca]

        Then again, will testing and quarantines be able to stop the spread anyways? Or is it more a matter of just treating the symptoms effectively to keep people alive until they fight it off?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          US to Canada will also be an interesting comparison. One anecdote, as of Friday, more coronavirus tests had been administered in British Columbia alone (population 5m) than in all of the United States.

          Shouldn't be a surprise, there's a huge chinese population there. There's a reason why here in Canada, the lower mainland in BC is called Hongcouver. Though most aren't from HK, but mainland China, and if you get hit by an expensive car you're better off writing it off since the 'new money' has a tendency of fleeing back to China to avoid prosecution. Most HK expats moved to Waterloo, Ontario and Markham(North Toronto), Ontario.

    • I too am interested to see how this plays out in comparison, but I'm not really of the belief that we have the slightest ides of what is going on in China, or if they've managed to slow the spread in the least. In some areas it has been reported they've stopped testing sick people, ergo no new cases and no new deaths reported to COVID-19. In others, for all I know, they're taking the opportunity to shoot some political enemies under the guise of containing the illness.
    • China have not managed to slow the spread to one portion of the country. It is EVERYWHERE. Hardly surprising since warnings before the massive Chinese New Year migrations were suppressed :-(. https://www.google.com/maps/d/... [google.com]

  • I can't find a "red flag" on here [wikipedia.org].

    Did they mean the red triangle?

  • As the man said (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ravenshrike ( 808508 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @11:01AM (#59787328)

    You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste. - Stalin. Wait no... my bad, Rahm Emanuel.

      • It's an extremely old statement with a little variation over translations, times etc.

        JFK famously said basically the same concept from which many people of that age have rephrased; it's likely where it comes from - but it's not the ONLY source of the expression. Crisis is always some kind of opportunity, you'll have people pointing that out in all of human history.

        JFK misunderstood the Chinese and said their characters for Crisis are 2 characters: 1 for danger and 1 for opportunity.

        Even "fake news" is just

    • You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste. - Stalin. Wait no... my bad, Rahm Emanuel.

      I honestly don't know whether coronavirus is something to worry about.

      On the one hand, it's a statistical certainty that the virus will get a foothold in the US and rampage across the country. Looking at China and applying it here, virtually everyone will get it with a 2.5% mortality rate.

      On the other hand, in the 2009 H1N1 epidemic the president(*) didn't declare a national emergency until 1,000 people had died and millions were infected. That event passed and I barely read about it.

      So far as I am aware, a

      • Does anyone have any realistic insight into the situation?

        I don't think virtually everybody is going to get it. Think that may be a bit overblown. I have relatives who are nurses and a college friend who is a Physician's Assistant and none of them seem overly concerned at this time. I'm figuring it may be like SARS but with fewer deaths.

        • This SARS has already killed more people than the previous SARS; Infection percent is expected to be between 30-70%, I'd lean towards expecting most people infected. Whether the mortality rate is really going ot be 2% remains to be seen, since the stats out of China are bound to be taken with a grain of salt. The mortality is heavily weighted to those over 70, though. If you're younger than 50 then you'll most likely feel like you have a bad case of the flu. Making sure there is enough space and resour

      • Re:Is this a crisis? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @12:21PM (#59787774)
        I appreciate you trying to keep politics out of it - I'll do the same (note: I have a sister who works at the CDC). Virtually everyone agrees the data out of China is fudged, but whether there are a lot more sick or a lot more dead or a lot more dead of bullet holes because it seems like a good opportunity to off a enemies, no one knows. If anything, the feeling is that the numbers are fudged downwards - there could be a lot more sick or dead, and China is playing it down (they don't want to tank their trade). The data out of Iran is, if anything, worse on the trustworthiness scale. So we've got some cases in Italy, kind of our first chance to get hard numbers about anything, and we're using the poor suckers on the cruise ships as contained experiments to see how contagious (early data seems like the answer is "very") and deadly (still assessing outcomes) it is. Data we do have seems to indicate it is more contagious than the flu, and has a long period (as long as 14 days perhaps) of incubation before symptoms emerge, so its a little early to see mass hospitalizations in Oregon yet from that vector, but you're correct in that we should be seeing something in the next week or so one way or the other. As for the markets, I personally believe it was a little bubbly and looking for any news to trend downwards, no need for a shove from either party. We did, from whatever group level you think should be responsible for this, lagging in testing capabilities - the current test kit is not only crazy expensive, but in shortages as well. The shortages will get fixed in time, don't know what will happen to the price, but the delays in both may allow the disease to spread undiagnosed for some period of time. The next couple of weeks could get quite exciting.

        • the current test kit is not only crazy expensive

          How expensive? A citation would be great.

          • The only data point I have is a guy who was billed $3270. https://www.miamiherald.com/ne... [miamiherald.com] Part of the problem here in the US is the difference between what the test costs and what you end up paying after insurance. When I had my shoulder surgery after a skiing accident, the "cost" of the plate they put in was $8800, but after a whole magilla with the insurance company, I ended up paying $375 out of pocket. Does that mean someone somewhere actually forked over $8800 for the same plate I have in my shou
            • That guy in Miami wasn't tested for the coronavirus. He was tested for the flu.

              Then hospital staff members told him he’d need a CT scan to screen for coronavirus, but Azcue said he asked for a flu test first. “This will be out of my pocket,” Azcue, who has a very limited insurance plan, recalled saying. “Let’s start with the blood test, and if I test positive, just discharge me.”

              Fortunately, that’s exactly what happened. He had the flu, not the deadly virus that has infected tens of thousands of people...

              IIRC, other sources have placed the cost of a coronavirus test at $250. Not cheap, but nowhere near the thousands that people are claiming here on slashdot.

              • In my mind I keep coming back to that statement I recall where some huge fraction of Americans couldn't come up with $400 for an emergency, and the test alone is $250 to say nothing of medication.

      • Yeah, I only vaguely remembered H1N1 and didn't know that many died. It does put things in perspective a bit.

        But the economic damage will certainly be real, mainly the supply chain damage. Hopefully it's temporary and quickly reverts to normal or it could be quite serious.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          Yeah, I only vaguely remembered H1N1 and didn't know that many died. It does put things in perspective a bit.

          About 3500 people, it wasn't until 1k were already dead that team Obama decided that it was important to do something. Trump's way a head of the curve with this vs H1N1.

      • Re:Is this a crisis? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by urusan ( 1755332 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @02:41PM (#59788462)

        The main thing to keep in mind is that the incubation period is two weeks, during which time you are infectious but not obviously sick. If there is community spread going on in the west coast, then the cases we are seeing now more or less represent the situation 2 weeks ago. These first few visible community-acquired cases are going to be some of the first people to get sick that way, and it will have been spreading unchecked for 2 weeks now that we're seeing the first cases. 2 weeks from now we'll find out how far it had spread as of right now, but it'll have had another 2 weeks to spread. Of course, this will happen continuously so we'll see a slow but exponential increase in the number of community-acquired cases, which we won't be able to halt because they already happened.

        Furthermore, since there's no travel restrictions it's much more likely to jump to other parts of the country. There's far more interstate travel than international travel in the US. So, you aren't necessarily safe just because you aren't living on the west coast. Everywhere it spreads to, the virus is going to have a 2 week head start before we start seeing cases.

        There are a few small caveats to this, if we were testing our population more extensively then we could theoretically catch more cases in the incubation period, and thus find out where it's spreading before 2 weeks has elapsed. That said, earlier stories on Slashdot have suggested that our testing programs are way behind the curve right now. More importantly, it's statistically unlikely for us to find the virus until it's already pretty prevalent in the population. If 40 people have it in California, then you'd have to test 1 million people in California at random to have any sort of chance of testing one of those 40 people, and it's really hard to really test people at random. Plus, that one person we might find will "just be one case", and not elicit as much alarm as multiple cases, even though there are 40 cases out there. Therefore, testing probably won't see the virus until there are many hundreds or thousands of people already infected (1000 people is 0.0025% of California's population, or about 1-in-400). So, testing will be useful to health authorities to find out where the community spread has become critical, and thus where it is justified to start quarantines to prevent the outbreak from widening, but it won't be so useful for stopping the spread around the US.

        Also, as you pointed out, there's a false positive rate for any test, so massive testing of the population is only useful once the number of real cases rises above the noise of false positives. That said, these community acquired cases are probably people getting sick and coming to the hospital, as opposed to people being found by screening programs, since after all we were hardly doing any screening before community-acquired cases started popping up.

        More importantly, the test for Coronavirus is especially accurate because they're looking directly for the virus's genes (a PCR assay, they are looking directly for the DNA (RNA?) pattern of the virus), so that makes false positives especially unlikely as you basically have to have Coronavirus's genetic sequence floating around inside of you for the test to be positive (unless someone really drops the ball on performing the test). I'm also pretty sure the health authorities are waiting until they're very confident to make an announcement, as unlike the media they don't have an incentive to get the news out ASAP. So, now that there's several known community-acquired cases, you can be pretty sure that Coronavirus has reached the US and is spreading through the community.

        One more important caveat here is that spring and summer are swiftly approaching, and the warmer weather and increasing solar radiation may blunt the spread of the virus. Coronavirus spreads a lot like the flu, and the same factors that reduce the spread of the flu in the summer will likely reduce the spread of Coronavirus. That said, summer alone won't stop Coronavirus enti

      • I don't know about being worried about the Corona virus itself. But if you were worried that China isn't shipping enough products, and the entire global economy halts because we don't have some random ass screw that's necessary to finish bolting together the tachometer in Fords, and so the entire production line there (and for their part suppliers) is halted until a replacement production for the screws gets up and going (times every product), I would understand that.

        But leaving politics aside as well, can

    • I don't even think that originates with Emanuel. It sounds like something straight out of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals which is something every politicians should be familiar with because if you aren't the one using it as a playbook you can bet that your opponent will be.

    • You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste.

      True, but I don't want to read a paywalled version of an article when Slashdot ran a non-paywalled version of the same thing on 18 Feb. 2020.

      China Enlists Tech Titans To Help It Track Coronavirus With Color-Based QR Codes [slashdot.org]

      China Enlists Tech Titans to Help It Track Coronavirus With Color-Based QR Codes: Report [gizmodo.com]

  • Channeling Rahm Emanuel (Score:3)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @11:05AM (#59787342) Homepage

    "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

    What better crisis than this for forcing direct control over their citizens?

  • A tale of two systems? (Score:3)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @11:23AM (#59787440)

    I think in the long run, China will win out on this compared with other countries...not by overall infection rate, but ability to control its population long enough to let the crisis pass. It's the same reason I think they're going to end up on top economically...other countries just don't have the direct control they do.

    We tend to leave critical decisions to politicians and other people looking out for their own interests, but China seems to take the long view in everything. If a decision is deemed to be the best choice, it's enacted with zero debate. Economically, the central government gets to choose what gets invested in and they have control over key industries. Our system is messier for better or worse, and any big change gets swept up in endless deliberation.

    We'll see what happens -- I find it amazing that with billions of people, they still have that level of control that they can enforce an entire regional quarantine and have it stick. That would never happen in the US...you'd have all the doomsday preppers rising up against the military.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      You should see the Twitter feeds of various Chinese dissenters instead of reading the filtered media. There is some seriously graphic videos of police brutally beating down protestors, the sick, people without these flags or masks, welding shut the entrances and exits to apartment buildings (guess when they'll be allowed out to get food), mass encampments for the sick with minimal health care, mass evacuation of homes, people throwing themselves out of quarantined apartment buildings.

      Many healthcare provide

    • It's the same reason I think they're going to end up on top economically...other countries just don't have the direct control they do.

      This is the basic communism philosophy but it doesn't work and tends to produce bread lines. It's next to impossible for a central planner to accurately predict and distribute the correct number of loaves on a daily basis. In a capitalist country thousands of bakers bake for their local customers and if they have a few extra, they eat them themselves with virtually no waste. On the smallest scale like a family or a monastery, communism works ok. On the medium scale, the distributed nature of capitalism

    • Jesus you're a fucking moron. They completely denied there was a problem in the beginning and even promoted a 40,000 family hot pot celebration in Hubei prior to admitting there was a problem which is virtually guaranteed to have massively spread the virus.

    • The quarantine of Wuhan failed spectacularly. Five million people fled in the three days before it was enacted, and started outbreaks in every corner of China. It's somewhat difficult to say at this point whether the quarantine ultimately did more harm or good. The outbreaks outside of Hubei province have not been nearly as severe, and these are places that were not locked down as hard. The lock-down may have starved the province of resources to take care of patients, and the makeshift mass wards turned int

  • "Neither the company nor Chinese officials have explained in detail how the system classifies people."
     
    Why is this BS posted here? The classifications are done by the person using the app. When people start the app they need to choose a color and self-report. Why do we pretend we "don't know how it works"? This is old news. Also, there really isn't anything wrong with it. I am sure the officials are trying to figure out the extent of the virus. Not everything is an evil Gubmint plot.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      The US is only one election away from voting communist. Expanded government is not something anyone should like.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        The US is only one election away from voting communist. Expanded government is not something anyone should like.

        Yet corporations are so intertwined. Corporatism leads capitalism to feudalism just as effectively as communism does. That's what we can observe happening covertly with the US and overtly with China.

  • It amazes me that western news outlets are astonished that a totalitarian regime uses technology to control its citizens and bit tech firms are willing to always chip in. Hell, IBM helped the Nazis [wired.com] so we should be surprised? We need to start waking up to the reality that even so-called democracies are just one or two steps away from doing the same thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Matheus ( 586080 )

      This. I straight laughed at TFS's comment about "a troubling precedent for automated social control". That government "by design" would be considered "a troubling precedent for MANUAL social control" and they have plenty of AUTOMATION already.. this may be a new "flavor" but it certainly isn't new.

      If a more democratic government was doing this it would be somewhat more troubling but as you say we're not as far from this reality as most people realize anyway so "troubling" but far from "surprising".

  • The collective can be formidable, United we stand, divided we fall. Depends on the ideals united on, individual freedom vs deference to the state. China learning like us all the hard way how to manage a pandemic. Lessons will be learned and some will exploit for greater control. Tracking patient contamination can help focus on risks but of course tracking pervasively becomes invasive and could continue as justification for pandemic control beyond the immediate crisis . The medical costs and collateral damag
  • Do they have gold stars and pink triangles too?
  • They have a very locked down nation (except for now, Hong Kong has "some" freedoms). Social media credit score, camera AI...release a virus, shuts down the "freedom" protesters. People get dragged out of their huts, placed in isolation to die if they didn't have the virus, they'll get it. Controls the population of the very young & very old. The very old are a "drain" on the communist resources. Now, they let people go back to work, but you have to have another app for "tracking" purposes.

  • I meant to type "can you share the analysis [about the fed]".

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