Battling virus outbreaks with new age technologies
Virus outbreaks like COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) and other old outbreaks like the SARS cannot be handled by technology alone, but the fact that technology is playing a sizable role in controlling the outbreak is indeed a good thing to know.
Imagine if your government knows whether you’re exposed to viruses like Corona? Yes, that’s possible.
China
China is one country that uses an extensive level of technologies to improve the quality of life. Although the Chinese government has faced controversies like using facial recognition and hardware on kids to understand their performance in school, the government says it’s for the public interest.
Well, it has worked. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has deployed drones to find people roaming around without masks and people in groups. The drone itself has a speaker to chase the people without masks to their house and they use other technologies like facial recognition to detect how people commute around the city.
Movement
The mathematics is very simple. You get exposed to viruses like Corona when you spend time with someone who is infected. By using facial recognition, the objective is to find whether you’ve spent time or space with the corona virus-infected patient anywhere in the city.
The government has a massive database of Chinese faces with their respective national ID card which will automatically provide all the necessary information. The government is tracking the route map traveled by infected people so that the fellow travelers can be alerted via a smartphone application.
It’s good to see that the Chinese government is practically implementing technologies like big data and facial recognition to tackle the coronavirus from spreading.
Around the Globe
It’s unfortunate that even some of the most developed countries are still not using such extensive technologies to identify and tackle coronavirus infected people. It’s primarily due to privacy reasons and lack of technology, but it looks like these technologies are going to hype extremely well after this scenario.
The fact that the government could actually find, diagnose and control the virus with the help of technology is nothing but a greater appreciation to the people who have worked for innovating and developing technology around the globe.
Chinese Government using technologies (WSJ)
