Academics say the western view of individual privacy being supreme has forced the use of lockdowns as a blunt instrument when there might be another way involving the smart use of technology.
Now that the world has completed a full circuit around the Sun with COVID as a passenger, it is possible to see which jurisdictions responded well, and which are still struggling to come to grips with the virus. Two of the nations held up as exemplars of how to fight COVID were Taiwan and New Zealand, but the approaches were very different: One has locked down parts of its population multiple times, and the other with more experience of respiratory viruses, has avoided such approaches. A recent academic paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand examined the two nations and raised a number of questions that deserve to be considered in light of a year of lockdowns, contact tracing, outbreaks, and other restrictions on the movement of people. The central push of the paper is that as New Zealand has kept individual privacy as a paramount concern, this has led directly to the use of city or nationwide lockdowns, which it has labelled as a blunt instrument. “An approach not much more advanced than techniques to mitigate the Spanish Flu pandemic over a century ago,” the paper states. By contrast, the paper contests that Taiwan was more successful because it embraced technology, particularly big data analysis, and was able to prepare the population, following SARS and MERS, so it could use such tactics for the coronavirus pandemic. “This new strategy aimed to link real-time medical information, location [from cell towers], and contact data of infected individuals (confirmed or suspected) to assist curbing the spread of future diseases,” the paper states. When someone entered Taiwan, an “electronic digital fence” system which monitored a person’s cell phone location was used to enable people to quarantine at home, rather than in a hotel quarantine system. “If a person in quarantine left their home, or their phone died and thus stopped transmitting a signal, local police and health or civil affairs agencies would be notified,” the paper said. “This system was complemented by random health-checks, community policing and phone calls from health officials and public authorities to ensure compliance. Individuals who did not have a cell phone capable of sharing location data were provided with one at the border.” See also: Living with COVID-19 creates a privacy dilemma for us all The system allowed people to have a degree of autonomy during quarantine, the paper said, at a cost to having their location tracked by the government. This system sounds particularly attractive as someone living in a country that has seen secondary lockdowns put in place, sometimes lasting 112 days, after breaches in hotel quarantine.
