The digital health app got China back in business within six weeks after Covid-19 lockdown - food for thought for the UK?
Most cities in China are back in business and production assembly lines have started running again after the Covid-19 pandemic swept the country. This took only about six weeks from the complete lockdown implemented in Wuhan on 23 January 2020. Crucial to this reopening is managing the risk of a second wave of infection using an innovative application of artificial intelligence to allocate people a new health QR-code.
Hangzhou, 200 kilometres south of Shanghai, is the capital of Zhejiang province and the city of my birth. I have been closely following the situation there. During the peak of the outbreak, Zhejiang had the second highest number of Covid-19 cases after the Hubei province (of which Wuhan is the capital). In the last two weeks, news from Hangzhou has been positive. Companies and organisations are operating again but schools remain closed. An old friend even suggests “the whole country will soon be GREEN on all Health QR- Codes”. But what are these “Health QR- Codes” and what is the underpinning digital system that China has been using? And how might it help to prevent a second wave of coronavirus infections?
The internet giant, Alibaba, developed and launched the “Health QR Code” system initially in Hangzhou. Residents apply for the Health QR code from the Alipay platform and it is displayed on their mobile phones. It uses green, yellow and red codes to indicate an individual’s risk of exposing others to the virus. At every visit to shops and residential areas, people have to display their QR code. The green code indicates low risk. Those who have a yellow code are asked to stay away from public places for seven days and with those with a red code to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Obtaining a Health QR Code takes less than two minutes using the Alipay mobile app. The applicant fills in personal information and answers a few simple questions about their current health and recent locations which are used to calculate the risks of exposing others to the virus. The system automatically verifies this with the data held on the digital cloud and issues a red, yellow or green code. Behind the colour codes are Ant Financial’s teams of programme designers who have developed the robust risk control technologies that support their efficient online financial services. In China, mobile sim-cards are linked to people’s identity cards and this allows the system to track the digital footprints of Alipay users across Alibaba’s various service platforms.
For the Health QR code programme, the user data required is perhaps simpler. The individual’s GPS positioning data while travelling, shopping, and using the internet over time, would suffice to analyse an individual’s geographical movements and physical contact with others. The information on the system updates regularly, and the colour of an individual’s code may change accordingly. To give an example, if the system knows a new Covid-19 patient and his/ her activity locations, then all those who were visiting the same place would be classified according to the risk of exposure, and the previous green colour of their Health QR code would change automatically to red or yellow.
With this system in place, individuals are able to know their own risk levels when deciding whether to go to work. What’s more, to reopen a business following the easing of the lockdown, Chinese cities such as Hangzhou have to ensure that all residents returning to their workplace are low risk, and also to manage about five million migrant workers, coming back from their homes in other locations across China. The municipal government is using pre-booked high-speed-train carriages, chartered planes and long-distance buses to bring back these workers since the return-to-work wave started. The Health QR code plays a vital role in ensuring that these workers can safely return. And the Health QR-code system is also used by many employers: every company and/ or institution checks the Health QR code of individual staff, as well as taking their temperature, before they can enter the premises.
It is precisely because of this system, post-epidemic, that the city of Hangzhou is able to move speedily towards normal life. In China, different cities and regions developed/ adopted different Health QR code systems, while Hangzhou trusts Alipay’s. Those who return to Hangzhou to work have to display Alipay’s “Hangzhou Health-QR codes” at check points in train stations, shops, residential areas, workplaces.
Of course, this system has been working well in China, but given our differences, could we operate such a programme in the UK? Would many of us consider it “intrusive” as a dystopian society illustrated in Black Mirror*? And if not, how long will it take us to return to work safely after the epidemic?
I put the question about the “intrusiveness” of the QR codes” to friends and colleagues in China. Their responses do not indicate widespread concern in a context in which attention is fixed on Covid-19. “Yes and no. Are we not intruded on from the day we are born?…; we also intrude on others”. I was also reminded “hey, we are in the middle of a deadly epidemic…”!
Some food for thought for when the UK also follows the same path of easing the current lockdown. Maybe there is something we can learn from the way China is handling returning back to normal life that we can adapt to better suit our beliefs and way of living after all?
*“Black Mirror” is a British science fiction TV series. Some compare China’s technological system with the dystopian society illustrated in the TV series, episode “Nosedive”.
