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The red colour of the QR code on Ms Sun’s “Hangzhou Health Code” app indicated that she was supposed to be undergoing 14 days of self-quarantine. Had the code been yellow, it would have meant she was a lower risk and had to isolate herself for seven days. For free passage around the city, people must produce their phones at checkpoints and show they have a green QR code. Pictured is another method of keeping tabs on people: drivers have to scan the code held up by a drone to register for entry into the city, in this case Shenzhen.

But those efforts involve only a single province. Creating such systems is far harder when it entails data-sharing between provinces, or between provincial and central authorities. Co-operation is undermined by competition for favour in Beijing. The boss of a foreign artificial-intelligence developer in China says that fusing datasets within a single firm is often quick, but not if it involves co-operation between different institutions. “The person in charge is unwilling to take the risk,” he says, and usually reckons that doing nothing is safer than sharing.

International and national laws recognize that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary measures. This means that certain fundamental rights, including the rights to privacy and data protection, may be restricted to address the current health crisis as long as basic democratic principles and a series of safeguards are applied, and the interference is lawful, limited in time, and not arbitrary.

Special legal orders and measures should be written and broadcast, and disseminated broadly in appropriate languages and forums. They must have a sunset clause; indefinite term measures are not acceptable. Potential extension could be considered if necessary, but extraordinary measures must be limited in their severity, duration, and geographic scope. Governments and authorities must take every measure to restore regular rules as soon as possible at the end of a special legal order.

The National Health Institute of​ Perú​ developed a platform where you can consult the health reports of patients who were tested for COVID-19 by entering their national identity document. For a few days, the information was therefore accessible to the public, not limited to the patient. After receiving criticism, the national 10 authorities included a second authenticator. To connect to the platform, an SMS-based code is now necessary. 11

The model, based on 13-year-old code for a long-feared influenza pandemic, assumed that the demand for intensive care units would be the same for both infections. Data from China soon showed this to be dangerously wrong, but the model was only updated when more data poured out of Italy, where intensive care was swiftly overwhelmed and deaths shot up.

It did not consider the impact of widespread rapid testing, contact tracing and isolation, which can be used in the early stages of an epidemic or in lockdown conditions to keep infections down to such an extent that when restrictions are lifted the virus should not rebound.

The idea behind so-called digital “passports” is that they would allow people who have recovered from the coronavirus to signal their immunity and thus move around freely, enabling economies to open up. But there are fears such a system, which is at a preliminary stage of discussion with the developer, could lead to discrimination, create perverse incentives to get infected, and violate privacy.

The scheme also relies on reliable antibody testing and enough kits for large-scale testing — neither of which exist, yet. Not to mention that health experts don’t know whether immunity to the coronavirus even exists and, if it does, how long it lasts. In late April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned against a passport scheme on the basis that “there is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”

Onfido’s technology would work by first verifying someone’s identity — by comparing a picture or video of their face against a picture of their identity card — and then linking that to a coronavirus test result. People would then be able to bring up a QR code on an app or a browser signalling their immunity status just by taking a picture of their face.