Author | M. Martínez @euklidiadasDo we have to choose between privacy and health? And the key question: Should we choose between privacy and health? There is a notable difference between Western and Asian approaches with regard to combating the coronavirus pandemic. While Europe or the United States are focusing on reinforcing their hospitalisation and ICU services, China, South Korea and Singapore are working on preventing it.These three regions have used or are using mobile technology to control an entire population, a strategy that violates the European GDPR (the most restrictive global data protection model) but which, in turn, is also rapidly controlling the contagion curve. It is not politics, it is science: mass surveillance works in the fight against pandemics.
Confirmed cases, compared with global cases
Taiwan recorded the first cases long before countries such as Spain, the United States or Mexico and, yet, by the beginning of March, there were barely 50 confirmed cases. The progress in this region has been slow or practically non-existent compared with the rest of the cases worldwide.
Big Data and technology to track and fight the Coronavirus in Taiwan
The SARS outbreak in 2003 was, for many Asian countries, a sign of what could happen in the future. Regions greatly affected by SARS, such as Hong Kong (death rate of 17% in 2003) or Taiwan (21.1%) decided, in 2004, to establish new protocols to prevent outbreaks like this and other viral diseases. To such a point that Taiwan began implementing measures before the official confirmation of the outbreak:“On December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was notified of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese officials began to board planes and assess passengers on direct flights from Wuhan for fever and pneumonia symptoms before passengers could deplane.” — Response to COVID-19 in TaiwanHowever, its active policy in search of contagious infections did not end there. Taiwan has been rated as one of the most high-tech regions in the world, with a vast unified population-level data source for generating real-world evidence. The National Health Insurance database was being screened in real time. The aim? To find patients with symptoms that may coincide with COVID-19, the name given to the disease caused by the officially named serious acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2.Despite being the second most vulnerable region in the world due to this outbreak at the end of January 2020, in March, Taiwan confirmed that its policies were working. But Big Data was not the only tool being used by this and other governments.QR codes leading to health declarations — Identifying high risk groups

How to track people in quarantine through their mobile phones
