The Rome Agenda
The Rome Agenda
A plan to save our planet
from pandemic domination
Norman Matrix
Dec 2020
China is a double edged sword that spawned the bane that is COVID-19 in late 2019 due to a animal-human cross infection that occurred on a meat market in Wuhan. At the same time it was the first country to completely gain control back as early as late spring 2020, while the world was (and is) still battling curbing the growth curve.
Wuhan as the most populous city in central China has been a very unfortunate point of origin for a virus as infectious as COVID-19. The Corona virus variant spread with exponential growth starting in the city, and quickly picking up national and international paths. Initial denial of risk by the Chinese government was quickly forced into rectification as the virus gained traction. It was an unfortunate piece of historic irony that they very same physician who created initial public awareness of the risk of a pandemic was one of the early victims after the spread started to reach exponential growth.
COVID-19 is a very efficient spreader since humans become infectious before developing symptoms, if they even develop any at all. In that regard the virus is worse than the foreboding visions in the TED talk Bill Gates held in 2015. He predicted that Earth will find a virus pandemic to become one of the prime vices shortly. His pessimism, or rather realism from today’s vantage point, arose from his Foundation experience of fighting Ebola in Africa. As such we are lucky that it is a pandemic with quite mild death rates compared to a beast like Ebola. On the other hand, the infection rate of Ebola was much easier to curb because the virus quickly resulted in extreme sickness and was very unlikely to spread unnoticed.
Now this situation is about to change with multiple vaccines seeing widespread approval and stocks slowly building. Unfortunately, the acceptance rate for vaccination is at all time low all over the world. This will result in difficulties to reach the necessary vaccination coverage for herd immunity resulting in natural retreat of the COVID-19 virus pandemic. The current situation should not be considered a temporary phase soon to resolve by itself.
If we have learned anything from 2020, to put it in the context of Bill Gates’ TED talk, our society needs to be prepared to handle a new virus pandemic in the future. This is the reason for this agenda putting light on the success in fighting virus spread in regions like China and South Korea. It is my conviction that as in every crisis, there is large potential to learn how to cope with — given ongoing COVID-19 pressure — the same, or similar future virus threats.
The central issue of our health system as a whole is that it focuses too much on reactive measures. The Corona family of viruses is fought with vaccination for decades now, but there still is around 10.000 to 60.000 deaths per year. Sickness of flu is treated with medication, but before COVID-19 hit the scene no one outside of the well-prepared East Asian nations from Japan to Korea cared about prevention of spreading such viruses too much. Looking at the situation of COVID-19 in summer 2020 in China in comparison to Europe shines a light on the vast differences in how virus infection is handled by both individuals and governments. While Wuhan was already partying again in late summer, with the last infection taking place months ago, Germany was just fighting data management woes in large test batches. Today Europe or US are seeing tight lock down scenarios while China is still sitting at double digit infection cases per day — in a country with more citizens than the two regions combined.
The COVID-19 disease is attacked in on four levels:
- Individuals are trained to execute proper personal hygiene and avoid unnecessary contact situations
- Proactive medical data tracking is applied to curb infection risk by well known variables of infection
- Reactive contact tracing is applied to curb infection spread from identified cases
- Vaccination is applied to provide resistance, with high acceptance rate
While the west is jumping ahead in vaccination programs due to the high infection rate pressure, it is lacking means in the first three categories of pandemic control. It is important to realize that from a cost/benefit point of view personal and pro-active measures are most effective. It is the efficiency in which China handles these parts of the equation why there a massive population with highly dense population areas can be managed without economic breakdown.
The following chapters will revisit each of the phases (excluding vaccination) and identify key benefits of the Chinese approach. It will analyze the data protection impacts of an hypothetical European COVID-19 response plan comparable to Chinese measures. Besides the mid- to long-term ongoing Corona pressure it is vital for our future to unlock the potential of pandemic management to gain improved medical capabilities for other health risks. Health will be a key performance factor outside of personal well-being in the future. We would do well to take our lesson and learn from those who did better in the past year for this reason.
Personal hygiene and individual behavior
The Chinese mentality is strongly influenced by Confucian thinking. If you are well, your family is well. If your family is well, your town is well. If your town is well, your region is well. The Chinese understand that any action set within your personal sphere of influence ripples out into your immediate environment. This is a mindset vastly superior to the egocentric western philosophy pushed by neoliberal “survival of the fittest” thinking. A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link. It is in the role of western governments to transform our self-image into more collaborative models.
Only then will people start to honor that personal hygiene is not only helping yourself, but also those most dear to you since you do regularly hold contact with them and risk infection spread. Media campaigns have been deployed to create anchors into this thought framework, and should continue with increased intensity.
Individual responsibility is also taken at much higher value in the communist rule set. While the west declares punishment in the form of minor financial nuisance, in China local party representatives do influence on a much wider scope. Ignoring lock down measures or not wearing masks will not only result in small fines, but influence your mid-term standing in your community. The social scoring mechanisms extend this approach into a formal rule set.
While the status quo on artificial intelligence bias makes social scoring inherently unfair, it is not without precedent to have some kind of track record of personal performance officially resulting in sanction. For example, the German traffic laws will issue negative points for violations that accumulate up to a point where you are no longer allowed to participate. Similar measures could be considered for personal COVID-19 measures being ignored. A virus score could influence the freedom you inhabit by tracking abidance of mask wearing, lock down commitment, or vaccination.
Currently, western countries are seeing issues with such means due to the well-intended constitutional guarantee of personal freedom. This is a misinterpretation of freedom since the virus situation creates a reversal of responsibility. If I get sick I risk the lives of others. This is no longer a question of my personal freedom. It is a question of me endangering others, which is well covered by constitutional and legal means.
Pushing the responsibility of such mechanisms into the economy sector is an escape from the fundamental guarantees a nation state should provide to it’s citizens. Currently states are welcoming decisions like air lines which will no longer transport unvaccinated passengers. The states should find collaborative strength to impose such sanctions on their own. In the transport domain the virus grows from an interpersonal issue to an international one, further increasing the impact of lax handling.
It should be applauded that many countries have understood that the transformation of personal identity in the pandemic situation is best handled by common media influencers. Role models like persons of public interest are utilized in campaigns to exert exemplary behavior. On the other hand media still shows awkward violations of simple rules like not wearing a mask in public appearance. This should be regulated just like the wearing of a mask in public spaces. Every case of unmasked appearance on TV can influence thousands, tens of thousands of critical thinkers into a negative mind set.
Overall it cannot be underestimated how much personal behavior influences the spread of a virus like COVID-19. Compared to the massive health costs created by infections and the economic devastation resulting from lock down, there should be massive public opinion campaigns possible within a fraction of these budget impacts.
Medical data tracking
China is the most advanced civilization on this planet in regards to deploying surveillance technology in public interest. There is an obvious gap between the definition of individual rights granted by western democracies and the communist system. In a similar line of thinking, the aforementioned reversal of responsibility in regards to virus spread, should though make a lot of surveillance technology means possible for deployments in virus response.
No one complains about banks protecting their property (and our wealth) with surveillance. No one complains about police protecting public safety (and our health) with surveillance. Why do people view data collection approaches to pandemic response with such a critical eye?
Health data is already tracked with very high granularity for personal gain. Every visit to a doctor, to a hospital, every medication is tracked in some more or less centralized database. In regards to a highly infectious virus like COVID-19, it should be considered that location data is also highly relevant for health concerns. In China or South Korea mobile location data is made available freely to the public institutions handling contact tracing for this exact reason.
The flow of individual traffic is very valuable in contact tracing. Mere deployment of voluntary apps on mobile phones does not do justice to the high criticality of the pandemic situation. Mobile phones do contain and transmit granular location data, which for example is available for mobile provider service optimization, personal apps utilizing the location data, or surveillance of individuals by government bodies. This high quality data needs to be untapped for contact tracing. Just as my personal safety is protected by tracking a criminal suspect, my personal health is protected by tracking a sick individual in a pandemic.
Cameras with thermal detection can easily identify risk scenarios in public spaces. For example, public transport stations are monitored for fever cases in China. Without such mechanisms, contact tracing will always stay one step behind, only reacting after an infection has been identified by a COVID-19 test. By utilizing public surveillance data proactive measures can be implemented to deescalate risks on a per site basis. Transport stations with high fever rates can be managed for distance keeping, and districts can dynamically opt in or out of mask regulations.
In similar regard device usage and fitness or lifestyle data should be untapped as medical data for pandemic response. Mobile phone vendors and app providers are already utilizing this data for economic gain. Studies have shown that sickness of a variety of forms can be well predicted by such data, even not considering deep sensor data like temperature and pulse also available for many individuals. It can not stand that corporations use wide user agreements to leverage health data which does not benefit society as a whole in such a critical situation.
In the end such data can make individual life both more comfortable and safe. A lot of the resistance against measures spurs from the lack of understanding the relationship between action and virus reaction. Utilizing more data will enable less measures with higher overall efficiency.
Data protection concerns
Considering the European Union data protection laws, there is enough leeway to apply many of the data collection means in COVID-19 context. Data protection does not apply to government institutions per se, and acknowledges higher interests. The reversal of responsibility definitely makes collecting my personal health data a higher interest in that context.
A lot of data collection processes can be established fully anonymized to still provide enough leverage for health measures. Other cases can be implemented in pseudonymized fashion, as it is best industry practice in economic scenarios. The General Data Protection Regulation definitely does not prohibit to close the gap between China and the West.
Our current ban hammer approach to data protection does the society no good. The loss of personal freedom due to health measures and lock downs during intensive infection phases is much higher than the potential loss due to collection of data. Also, and this is again a mind set issue, people do not realize that data collection already takes place at exactly the level needed for COVID-19 response. It is just the beneficiaries that are positioned wrongly at the moment, with large international enterprises seeing free access while our own governments lock themselves out. This cannot stand as it is. Data needs to be untapped for greater good.
