WRT the calls for mass testing as per South Korea.
This BBC world service programme about /south Korea is worth listening to.
Only the centralised state, ID cards and ability to track and publish location and movement of individuals via Mobile phones made testing work.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csythk
##################
And this snippet from a Telegraph article about Taiwan:
It was 7am when James Fox was dragged from his slumbers by an incessant ringing on the doorbell of his flat in the Taiwanese capital where he was undergoing a 14-day coronavirus quarantine.
Still groggy with sleep, the American university researcher opened the door to find an irate policeman who instantly began to berate him in rapid-fire Chinese. “I had no idea why because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It was a very frightening experience,” he recalled.
Mr Fox’s mistake had been to switch his mobile phone onto "airplane" mode in order to get a good night’s sleep, unwittingly dropping off the Taiwanese government’s electronic surveillance grid for those being quarantined after arriving from overseas.
The knock at the door came despite Mr Fox receiving two calls a day from a government-assigned social worker to check that he had not developed Covid-19 symptoms after a recent trip to Iceland.
His experience, shared on a Facebook group, offered a flicker of insight into the extent that some governments are prepared to go to suppress the spread of Covid-19, raising profound questions for Western democracies about how the state, big data and society should intersect as the global pandemic takes hold.
##########################
This BBC world service programme about /south Korea is worth listening to.
Only the centralised state, ID cards and ability to track and publish location and movement of individuals via Mobile phones made testing work.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csythk
##################
And this snippet from a Telegraph article about Taiwan:
It was 7am when James Fox was dragged from his slumbers by an incessant ringing on the doorbell of his flat in the Taiwanese capital where he was undergoing a 14-day coronavirus quarantine.
Still groggy with sleep, the American university researcher opened the door to find an irate policeman who instantly began to berate him in rapid-fire Chinese. “I had no idea why because I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It was a very frightening experience,” he recalled.
Mr Fox’s mistake had been to switch his mobile phone onto "airplane" mode in order to get a good night’s sleep, unwittingly dropping off the Taiwanese government’s electronic surveillance grid for those being quarantined after arriving from overseas.
The knock at the door came despite Mr Fox receiving two calls a day from a government-assigned social worker to check that he had not developed Covid-19 symptoms after a recent trip to Iceland.
His experience, shared on a Facebook group, offered a flicker of insight into the extent that some governments are prepared to go to suppress the spread of Covid-19, raising profound questions for Western democracies about how the state, big data and society should intersect as the global pandemic takes hold.
##########################
Last edited: