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.

One way the virus hurts the economy is by disrupting the supply of labour, goods and services. People fall ill. Schools close, forcing parents to stay at home. Quarantines might force workplaces to shut entirely. This is accompanied by sizeable demand effects. Some are unavoidable: sick people go out less and buy fewer goods. Public-health measures, too, restrict economic activity. Putting more money into consumers’ hands will do little to offset this drag, unlike your garden-variety downturn. Activity will resume only once the outbreak runs its course.

A downturn stemming from an epidemic is an unusual one. And it might prove unusually difficult for policy makers to fight, in the United States and abroad.For one, the coronavirus epidemic has come with extraordinary, intense uncertainty. Officials are not sure how many cases there are and how deadly the virus is. Businesses and households are uncertain of how long the danger will last and what measures governments might take to counter it. People are afraid, as the market panic demonstrates, and it may take months for that fear to abate.

judiciously targeted bailouts are really the only way I can think of to keep businesses and people from going bankrupt given the absence of pandemic insurance.”

Harvard’s Jason Furman has suggested that Congress send every adult American $1,000 and every child $500

Yet if we are not careful, the epidemic might nevertheless mark an important watershed in the history of surveillance. Not only because it might normalise the deployment of mass surveillance tools in countries that have so far rejected them, but even more so because it signifies a dramatic transition from “over the skin” to “under the skin” surveillance. 

A self-motivated and well-informed population is usually far more powerful and effective than a policed, ignorant population. 

The government has already boasted that millions of citizens have shared this information with them at a time when most Iranians are completely in the dark about the threat from coronavirus. The government is being accused of covering up the real infection and death rates with experts claiming the real figures are exponentially higher. With confusion and fear gripping many parts of Iran, this app is looking to take advantage of that to boost Tehran's surveillance capabilities.

It is impossible to say how many of Iran’s citizens have downloaded the app, but according to this tweet from the ICT minister MJ Azari Jahromi, at least 3.5 million people have now shared their precise location and intimate details with the government.

“The regime’s attitude is evident during the coronavirus crisis,” Gobadi said. “Instead of being transparent and alerting the public regarding the real scope of the crisis, the regime has resorted to a massive campaign of deception and concealment particularly as it pertains to the number of victims and fatalities.”

According to the article, the mayor wrote on his website: “Compliance with the regime is constantly monitored, including with the help of facial recognition systems and other technical measures.”

As South Korean media pored over their movements, citizens looked on with a mixture of horror and fascination as their private lives were laid bare, leading to speculation that they were having an affair and that the secretary had undergone plastic surgery.

Everyone is cooking the data, one way or another. And yet, even though these inconsistencies are public and plain, people continue to rely on charts showing different numbers, with no indication that they are not all produced with the same rigor or vigor. This is bad.

The other problem is, now that the U.S. appears to be ramping up testing, the number of cases will grow quickly. Public-health officials are currently cautioning people not to worry as that happens, but it will be hard to disambiguate what proportion of the ballooning number of cases is the result of more testing and what proportion is from the actual spread of the virus.

People trust data. Numbers seem real. Charts have charismatic power. People believe what can be quantified. But data do not always accurately reflect the state of the world. Or as one scholar put it in a book title: “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron.

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

Self-employed people in the North and Midlands are more likely to be in insecure, lower-paid roles at high risk from economic shocks

Cities in the Greater South East are more likely to be able to shift to working from home

The jobs that could be more easily done from home – such as consultants or finance – are concentrated in cities in the Greater South East (see the figure below). Assuming some sectors could completely shift to home working if necessary, up to one in two workers in London could shift to working from home. Meanwhile in Reading, Aldershot and Edinburgh over 40 per cent of workers could too.

Now, as the covid-19 pandemic rages, several independent sources say that Palantir has started work with a new client: Britain’s National Health Service.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

The coronavirus is killing black and Latino people in New York City at twice the rate that it is killing white people

In New York City, Latinos represent 34 percent of the people who have died of the coronavirus but make up 29 percent of the city’s population, according to preliminary data from the city’s Health Department. Black people represent 28 percent of deaths but make up 22 percent of the population.

In Chicago, for example, black people account for 72 percent of virus-related fatalities, even though they make up a little less than a third of the population.

What would be particularly useful right now is a commitment to routinely collect and publish data on the demographics of everyone impacted by the coronavirus so that we can understand and act on these concerns. At the moment, we know the age and sex of everyone who contracts and tragically dies from the coronavirus, but we still have little additional reliable information, including about their ethnicity. If the information was collected and published in real time, it would help bring the true scale of the problem to light and provide more evidence about how to protect communities from the virus. Promises to provide this data in the future is not good enough – we need it to be collected and published right now. There simply is no good reason to wait.

Starting on Tuesday, more than 300 Amazon employees have pledged to stay home from work, according to worker rights group United for Respect, as frustrations mount over protections and support for Amazon employees. Workers claim the company has failed to provide enough face masks for workers, did not implement regular temperature checks it promised at warehouses, and has refused to give workers paid sick leave.

A US study suggests Covid-19 death rates rise by about 15% in areas with even a small increase in fine-particle pollution levels in the years before the pandemic."Patterns in Covid-19 death rates generally mimic patterns in both high population density and high [particulate matter] PM2.5 exposure areas," the Harvard University report says.

“Either you keep this anonymous and potentially somewhat exploitable, or you just go full Black Mirror and tie it to people and identities,” said Samy Kamkar, a security researcher who is cofounder and chief security officer of access control company Openpath, in an interview with The Markup.

Renowned University of Cambridge security researcher Ross Anderson captures the threat perfectly in his critique of the proposal: The performance art people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run around the park; the Russians will use the app to run service-denial attacks and spread panic; and little Johnny will self-report symptoms to get the whole school sent home.

Perhaps the largest difference between the UK and France has been in the quality of data that is being provided to the public, to the media, and (I suspect) to the politicians making decisions about what to do. National, regional, sub-regional, and demographic breakdowns of deaths, hospital admissions, intensive care capacity and occupancy, excess deaths, and much more are provided regularly by French government bodies. The data.gouv.fr site hosts discussions where data is improved, improvements are requested, and analysis is shared. While The Financial Times has undoubtedly provided the best data analysis to the world, no UK paper has access to the data that would let it provide as good analysis to the country as the French press and French society have been able to provide to the French public and its politicians.

“In a perfect world we would have data at a regional, or even more granular level, and cover not just broad-brush numbers of positive and negative tests and deaths. It would have more-localised data, breakdowns by gender and age bands. It would cover numbers of ITU patients, numbers of people recovered, the number of test kits we have, staffing, ventilators etc,” Watt says.