Pandemic in the age of tech
Artikel ini tersedia juga dalam Bahasa Indonesia di sini
The Covid-19 pandemic has been taking the world by storm since its global outbreak started in early 2020. It has disrupted most everyday activities as infections spread rapidly across the globe and governments advising their citizens to stay home to minimize the risk of contracting or spreading the virus.
Such an advise, dubbed “social distancing” (or “physical distancing” as the public health experts at World Health Organization (WHO) suggested we use instead), means that we are strongly encouraged to avoid crowds and limit physical interactions with other people — as nobody is immune to this new strain of coronavirus, so everyone is at risk of being infected. When people comply with this suggestion, we will together “flatten the curve” or slow down the spread of infection.
Social distancing would mean that people have to avoid going out to public spaces where people-to-people contacts are inevitable. Governments around the world, including West Java under Governor Ridwan Kamil’s administration, have closed schools and universities, canceled mass gatherings, and advised governmental bodies and companies to let their employees work from home. Technology has played a key role in making this possible.
Despite the fact that technology has long enabled things to be done virtually — requiring little to no physical contact — before COVID-19 happened, this pandemic has ‘forced’ a more massive movement of people doing most of their activities online in order to keep everyone inside their houses. Teachers are holding lessons in virtual classrooms, people are ordering their groceries and lunch take-outs from mobile apps, even high-level national and international governmental meetings are done through teleconferences.
Thanks to technology innovations — which functions we used to take for granted before the pandemic — like virtual meeting rooms, teleconference apps, online project management platform, e-commerce, and cloud-based file-sharing services; this ‘emergency’ work/study-from-home scheme is going to be the new normal for the coming weeks — when the peak of infection is happening.
Surely, we can’t overlook the fact that not everybody in infected areas has the privilege of staying home during the pandemic. There are people whose services couldn’t yet be replaced by technology’s virtual assistance, like security personnel, public transportation drivers, and food-vendors. But when the people who have the option to stay home comply with social distancing advice, we will be able to protect those workers by minimizing the risks of them contracting the virus while doing their jobs.
More importantly, by practicing social distancing, we help prevent doctors and health workers from getting overwhelmed by the number of people infected in hospitals. Last week, Indonesian doctors took on social media; begging people to stay home to prevent them from spreading or getting the virus and help them provide optimal care for the seriously-infected patients without getting overwhelmed.
Many doctors also joined forces in igniting a campaign offering virtual consultation and diagnosis (or, as people call it, telemedicine) through their social media accounts to advise against people going to hospitals when they have mild symptoms similar to those of COVID-19.
Indonesian tech startups have also done their part in promoting telemedicine during this time of pandemic; including Go-JEK’s collaboration with Halodoc in providing online consultation for COVID-19 symptoms and Prixa’s artificial intelligence-assisted self-diagnosing feature.
Sophisticated technology innovation is not exactly a novelty in the effort of curbing a virus, as Cambridge’s FluPhone app had already employed it in 2011 to track the flu virus infection. But in a time of a global pandemic, it’s rather alien to see countries take different approaches, to various extents, in employing technologies as an effort to tackle the widespread of coronavirus infection.
South Korea and Singapore are two examples of how the use of technology is critical during a pandemic. Both countries are quick in carrying out robust measures in using technology innovations to “flatten the curve” — means to avoid exploding number of cases that would overwhelm the healthcare system and would leave many critical cases unattended, and hence pressing the fatality rate to a minimum.
The South Korean government sends real-time updates of COVID-19 cases via text messages, websites, and mobile applications. The app, developed by the country’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety, is called ‘Corona 100m’, or Co100 for short. Co100 will send an alert to citizens who have installed the app when they are within 100 meters where an infected person had visited. The purpose is to lower the risks for citizens to be exposed to the virus by informing them to avoid visiting those “potentially dangerous places without checking the travel history of those infected”.
Citizens, however, can look at travel histories of confirmed COVID-19 patients through the Coronamap website.
Singapore has also launched “TraceTogether”, a mobile app allowing the government to monitor the spread of COVID-19 in the city-state. The app asks for its users’ consent to track their movements as well as use their Bluetooth to detect their proximities with other users’ locations. TraceTogether will notify users if they were in a close location to someone who had tested positive of COVID-19 and, with their permission, will send their data to the government which will assist them to get tested.
South Korea’s and Singapore’s rather extreme measures through technology interventions had surely raised privacy concerns. The Guardian reported that South Korean governments’ text alerts of places potentially exposed to the virus, though meant as a public health service, had provoked social stigma and disturbed businesses.
Meanwhile, as Singapore’s TraceTogether had been labeled as a ‘high-tech state surveillance app’, its Health Minister ensured that users’ identity and location data are not recorded and are stored in users’ phones in encrypted forms.
In Indonesia, even without a location-tracking app, its first two confirmed cases had suffered privacy-leak issues and were then scrutinized by irresponsible netizens on social media.
It is definitely difficult to weigh the pros and cons or to what extent should the government employ technology to help accelerate measures in handling the coronavirus amid this global pandemic, where everyone seems to be overwhelmed by its rapid spread. Most critics expressed concerns over what the government’s power would look like after the pandemic is conquered if we allowed them our private data now or if this tech-assisted coronavirus-fighting effort would normalize state surveilling.
Issues aside, other countries and organizations seemed to be following South Korea and Singapore’s footsteps. The World Health Organization (WHO) is reported to be planning the launch of its own Android, iOS, and web application called ‘WHO MyHealth App’ on March 30. The early version of this app, developed as open-source in which its progress could be monitored in this GitHub repository, will provide helpful tips, news, and alerts to keep you updated amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
While Indonesia is yet to launch its own app and still rely heavily on text alerts and a lot of websites, its most populous province’s administration, the West Java Government, has launched the mobile and web application of its COVID-19 information and coordination center called “Pikobar” on March 20.
The Pikobar app is developed by the province’s digital and innovation team, Jabar Digital Service, and is open-source. It offers updates on daily numbers of COVID-19 national and local cases and provides infection-spread maps and data visualizations. The app, collaborating with AI-assisted telemedicine startup Prixa, also allows citizens to self-diagnose when they develop mild symptoms similar to COVID-19’s.
Hoping to become a hub for public-private collaboration and promote civic engagement amid the pandemic, Pikobar also serves as a platform to collect donations and pool developers, medics, policy analysts, and logistics workers who want to volunteer their time and skills in helping the government fight COVID-19.
Pikobar is also accessible through pikobar.jabarprov.go.id.
