[LINK] Off Topic: 1 Why China’s extreme coronavirus controls are unlikely to work elsewhere

[Stephen Loosley]

Why China’s extreme coronavirus controls are unlikely to work elsewhere

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3094140/why-chinas-extreme-coronavirus-controls-are-unlikely-work

.. At the other end is China, where the deadly new virus was first reported late last year, and which has been pursuing a strategy of elimination – it wants zero new infections.

It is doing this using extreme surveillance measures to identify and quarantine every single new case.

But a closer look at how China has managed to get the pandemic under control shows it is a model that, despite its impressive results, cannot be replicated elsewhere.

In Beijing, four days after the first case was traced to the Xinfadi wholesale market on June 11, the authorities had identified 200,000 workers and people who had visited since May 30.

Big data has played a big role in this “precise contact tracing”, according to chief government epidemiologist Wu Zunyou.

And it is supported by a vast network of community social control units – a grid-based neighbourhood monitoring and management system that exists across China.

This has meant that, for example, a woman who had not set foot in Xinfadi but had picked up her husband in a car 3km away from the market got a phone call telling her to have a nucleic acid test. Before she had even verified the call, there were community cadres at her door asking her to get tested.

Real-name registration for telephone numbers and public transport such as trains, as well as a large number of surveillance cameras, have made this contact tracing possible.

Then there is the mass testing – anyone with a link to the market, close contacts of patients and all residents of compounds near the market had to have a test. In the first nine days after the Beijing outbreak began, 2 million people had been tested.

The authorities used a method known as pool testing to speed up the process, where tents were set up and grass-roots officials made arrangements for every resident of the designated areas to line up to get tested.

They were done in groups of five people, with their samples grouped together. If one person tested positive then the whole group would be retested to identify who it was. If all of the tests were negative, then the whole group was cleared.

Outside the high-risk areas, Beijing was spared from another lockdown.

But residents, like many people across China, still need to show a health code on their phones to enter many places – shopping malls, parks, office buildings – as they move around the city.

This QR colour code is generated on an app to indicate infection risk according to personal information, health status, places visited, and contact with confirmed cases.

In Xinjiang, the authorities have taken tougher action, locking down the capital Urumqi and halting all major forms of transport.

But in both places, this zero-case strategy relying on big data and surveillance comes at the cost of privacy and freedom of movement, and it is not practical outside mainland China.

Authorities from mainland China to Hong Kong to the United States will have to find their own ways to manage risks and contain outbreaks based on their own context – but they will all need a dose of patience, and a meticulous approach.