When it comes to beating the coronavirus, technology has a big role to play… but what about civil liberties?
There have been a number of different responses around the world to the coronavirus COVID 19 international health emergency.
In China, where the problem began, not simply due to lax regulation of its food markets and continued food safety incidents but also to the authoritarian methods of a highly centralized regime that led local and regional governments there to try to minimize the outbreak, taking few or no measures, while those who warned of the dangers were silenced. China was not alone in responding in this way: other dictatorships like Iran or North Korea did exactly the same.
But China soon went on the offensive, imposing draconian isolation measures: more than 46 million people were told to stay in their homes and 780 million, almost half the country, were subject to travel bans. The result was empty streets and an agricultural and industrial shutdown, that resulted in a much cleaner air. In addition, the government devoted virtually unlimited efforts to ensure compliance with these measures and, according to a recent report by the World Health Organization (WHO), has managed to halt the advance of the epidemic from the thousands of cases reported daily in January and February to the 125 detected yesterday.
