Revision for my Research paper (writing course)
Combat COVID-19 with big data and artificial intelligence

Yanan Tang

University of Rochester

Professor Wang

WRT 105E: Being Homo Sapiens

Introduction

Disease knows no border, and the threat is only increasing. Global influenza pandemic is not a matter of, but when, and the impact can be catastrophic. In fact, Bill Gates believes that “a global influenza pandemic is one of the greatest threats to humanity.”(Rocketto)But the good news is we are in the middle of an information evolution, where big data and artificial intelligence are helping us make more informed decisions every day. We can’t stop what we can’t see, but information is our best counter measure. The past few years have witnessed the rise of big data, which has upended established ways of doing business while promising to usher in a new era of digitally-defined analytics. China tapped into big data, machine learning and other digital tools as the COVID-19 virus spread through the nation in order to track and contain the outbreak. The lessons learned there have continued to spread across the world as other nations fight the spread of the virus and use digital technology to develop real-time forecasts and arm healthcare professionals and government decision-makers with big data they can use to predict the impact of the coronavirus. (Taylor, 2020)

While relatively few people were thinking about the role of big data when it comes to fighting health crises just a few years ago, the continued spread of COVID-19 has led many to ask how big data initiatives can help in a pandemic. It’s becoming increasingly clear that our ability to generate, record, and analyze data is an essential part of our pandemic response strategy. COVID-19 is an highly contagious disease that can transmit before and after the onset of symptoms. To enable successful containment, contact tracing and quarantine are essential to cover all the population with symptoms. Many nations use big data and AI in contact enforcement, such as Mainland China and South Korea. This paper is going to investigate how big data could help address and combat with the health crisis of a pandemic such as COVID-19.

In December 2019, a sporadic coronavirus (COVID-19) broke out in Wuhan, China, rapidly

spreading across China and the rest of the world. As this is a novel disease, effective pharmaceutical interventions are not expected to be available for months; meanwhile community containment measures such as stay-at-home orders and lockdowns have been widely implemented by affected countries aiming to flatten the epidemic curve impacting an estimated 3 billion people globally. While European countries and the U.S. seek ways to exit lockdown and return to some semblance of normalcy during the ongoing pandemic, China reached the one-month milestone of its official end of the nation-wide lockdown on 8 April 2020. Similar to mainland China, South Korea has also taken initiative to fight against the virus. Commonalities of these successful responses include swift and decisive interventions to promote or impose social distancing, active case detection and prompt isolation of all cases, government responsibility for all associated costs, relentless public messaging about containment measures, and the wide use of big data to trace individuals who may have come into contact with infected individuals.

During the 2015 MERS outbreak, South Korea first developed tools for aggressive testing and contact tracing. In response to COVID-19, South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) deployed the contact tracing system, known as the COVID-19 Smart Management System (COVID-19 SMS), that uses data from security camera footage, credit card records, even GPS data from cars and cellphones to trace the movement of individuals with COVID-19. They can also find or cross-check other people whom the patient had close contact with, prior to quarantine. The system takes 10 minutes to analyze the movement of the infected individuals. For people who come in contact with an infected person, the KCDC informs the local public health center near the infected citizen’s residence and the health center sends the notification to them. Among people who test positive, those requiring treatment are hospitalized at the COVID-19 special facilities and those without symptoms are asked to remain self-quarantined for 14 day with their compliance to quarantine actively monitored.

China’s Surveillance Infrastructure Used to Track Exposed People

To contain the outbreak, the Chinese government has implemented large-scale social distancing policies, including quarantine, isolation, and travel restrictions to limit cross-regional population. China’s surveillance culture became useful in the country’s response to COVID-19. 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.

From New York Times, we found that 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. The article COVID-19 Control Strategies In Taizhou city, China also mentions that COVID-19 control strategies in Taizhou city, ChinaCOVID-19 control strategies in Taizhou city, China

Since 19 February, the government of Taizhou has been using the Health Code, a quick response (QR) code showing the probability of a person having COVID-19. All citizens had to download the mobile application, such as Alipay or WeChat, containing the QR code to their smartphones. They filled in a questionnaire about their symptoms and exposure history in the applications when applying the QR code for the first time. When entering into traffic checkpoints, workplaces, communities and other public places they had to display the real-time Health Code and their temperatures were measured. After users fill in a form on Alipay with personal details, the software generates a QR code in one of three colors. A green code enables its holder to move about unrestricted. Someone with a yellow code may be asked to stay home for seven days. Red means a two-week quarantine. In Hangzhou, it has become nearly impossible to get around without showing your Alipay code. Propaganda-style banners remind everyone of the rules: “Green code, travel freely. Red or yellow, report immediately.” Similar to South Korea’s SMS system , Health Barcode is a product of public-private partnership. It enables a dynamic epidemic risk management of COVID-19 using individual self-report health status and travel history in combination with big data from aviation, railway and ground transportation systems, social media to retrace personal movement.

The Chinese government also rolled out a “Close Contact Detector” app that alerted users if they were in contact with someone who had the virus. Travel verification reports produced by telecom providers could list all the cities visited by a user in the last 14 days to determine if quarantine was recommended based on their locations. By integrating the data collected by China’s surveillance system, the country was able to find ways to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
Big Data and technology to track and fight the virus in Taiwan

Taiwan is 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to have the second highest number of cases of coronavirus due to its proximity to and number of flights between China. It was one of the first regions in the world to apply personal monitoring technology and QR images, if not the first. Other regions such as Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea implemented similar measures. This initiative can now be found in western countries including Spain or Italy. It used new technology, including 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 past 14 days. The idea of this technology is relatively simple. QR is an image that links users to a website instead of typing it by hand . It just needs to be scanned like a barcode. The website displays a personal form with basic questions. Users type in a personal code, such as an ID document, they indicate possible symptoms and the data will go straight to Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control. Taiwan leveraged its national health insurance database and integrated it with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics; it generated real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms to aid case identification.

Technology is vital in the fight against coronavirus and future pandemics. In addition to being able to support modeling efforts and predicting the flow of a pandemic, big data, machine learning, and other technology can quickly and effectively analyze data to help humans on the frontlines figure out the best preparation and response to this and future pandemics. The Vital Role Of Big Data In The Fight Against Coronavirus on Forbes reported that Officials took immediate action from the minute WHO broadcast information about a pneumonia of unknown cause in China on Dec. 31, 2019. This was the first reported case of coronavirus, and Taiwan’s quick response and use of technology are the likely reasons they have a lower rate of infection than others despite their proximity to China. (Marr The Vital Role Of Big Data In The Fight Against Coronavirus)

We notice that all four regions including Mainland China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan use big data and AI in contact tracing and strict enforcement. These government are backed up by strong shared public support of collective well-being over individual freedom during large-scale emergencies, contributing to their success in flattening the curve.

Mobile App for Contact Tracing

The UK’s bungling of its attempt to come up with an effective contact tracing app for coronavirus has led the date of its launch to shift from May to this winter. It includes a map that is “Geiger counter”-style that would warn people about areas with a large number of infections; a countdown timer that helps us track the duration of an enforced period of self-isolation and barcodes for buildings that would enable offices and restaurants to know if anyone with the virus visited them. App-based contact tracing is appealing in part because the coronavirus’ spread is so stealthy. Infected people can transmit the virus for days before they develop symptoms, and it can take several more days for public health investigators to learn about a case and confirm it with testing. These teams then have precious little time for traditional contact tracing: interviewing the infected person, tracking down all the recent contacts they can recall, and getting those people to self-isolate before they pass on the virus.

In Europe and America, privacy considerations for citizens are of bigger concern than they are in China, yet medical researchers and bioethics experts understand the power of technology to support contact tracing in a pandemic. Oxford University’s Big Data Institute worked with government officials to explain the benefits of a mobile app that could provide valuable data for an integrated coronavirus control strategy. Since nearly half of all coronavirus transmissions occur before symptoms occur, speed and effectiveness to alert people that may have been exposed are paramount during a pandemic such as coronavirus. A mobile app that harnesses 21st-century technology can accelerate the notification process while maintaining ethics to slow the rate of contagion.

COVID-19 is not the first epidemic for which mobile technology and big data have been used to combat with virus. Tech innovators had already worked on solutions to effectively monitor and track the spread of flu. FluPhone was introduced in 2011, but the app wasn’t highly accepted so it limited its usefulness to some extent. At least 29 countries are now using mobile data to help with contact tracing.

From Mary Hui’s journal on Quartz, she mentions that Singapore’s contact tracing app, TraceTogether, was launched on March 20 and claims to be the first national BlueTooth tracing solution in the world. It now boasts about 1.1 million users, just under one-fifth of the country’s population, and the government has made publicly available the app’s protocol. The app works by trading and logging unique identifying codes over BlueTooth signals of nearby phones with the app installed, and the data is accessed to identify close contacts when a user tests positive for the coronavirus. Critics, however, say that BlueTooth is flawed as a contact tracing technology because of its potential to turn up a large number false positives.

Trade-off between big data and privacy

Last but not the least, there appears to exist an inevitable trade-off between public health and individual privacy. The application of big data and AI in contact tracing is considered as a double-edged sword. The heavy surveillance has drawn criticisms among the public, as disclosure of personal location information was seen as violating basic human rights and personal privacy. The methods used to collect and aggregate information require further scrutiny and tailoring to ensure that the privacy rights of individuals are not infringed. That is, the current provisions of infectious disease prevention and enforcement ordinances are vague in terms of protecting the privacy rights of data subjects. For example, the information gathered from the public by different government branches and organizations is just designated as “important information about national health”. In practice, both the Government or authorized private sector organizations may have access to personal data, but the mechanism for the processing, use and storage of the personal data lacks transparency, with the potential for abuse of personal data in the future.

Conclusion

Although there is a lot of debates and doubts going on about balancing between individual privacy and public health, many researchers and technology companies are exploring ways to improve cryptography that would enable contact-tracing systems without mass surveillance in order to achieve the benefits of location-tracking while protecting individual privacy. For example, to balance the need for contact tracing and privacy, European authorities have proposed that data be retained for only 14 days, the period of possible viral transmission. Some European countries are deploying an opt-in smartphone tracking application with anonymized data, no central database and no GPS information.

Works Cited

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Lin, Haijiang, et al. “COVID-19 Control Strategies in Taizhou City, China.” World Health Organization.Bulletin of the World Health Organization 98.9 (2020): 632-7. ProQuest. 13 Oct. 2020

Schillinger, Dean, M.D., Deepti Chittamuru PhD., and A. Susana Ramírez PhD. “From “Infodemics” to Health Promotion: A Novel Framework for the Role of Social Media in Public Health.” American Journal of Public Health 110.9 (2020): 1393-6. ProQuest. 13 Oct. 2020

Marr, Bernard. “The Vital Role Of Big Data In The Fight Against Coronavirus.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 Apr. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/04/09/the-vital-role-of-big-data-in-the-fight-against-coronavirus/?sh=65e706e93806.

Von Krogh, Georg, Burcu Kucukkeles, and Shiko Ben-Menahem. “Lessons in Rapid Innovation from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” MIT Sloan Management Review 61.4 (2020): 8-10. ProQuest. 13 Oct. 2020 .

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(7)Mozur, Paul, et al. In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags. 2 Mar. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/china-coronavirus-surveillance.html.

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(10) Hui, Mary. “Singapore Wants All Its Citizens to Download Contact Tracing Apps to Fight the Coronavirus.” Quartz, Quartz, 22 Apr. 2020, qz.com/1842200/singapore-wants-everyone-to-download-covid-19-contact-tracing-apps/.