Coronavirus: in Taiwan as in South Korea, tracing is not in debate

As in South Korea, in Singapore, digital tracing is applied to the population. (Illustrative photo). Catherine LAI / AFP

Text by: Stéphane Lagarde Follow

With more than 23,000 deaths, France is among the countries most affected by the Covid-19 viral pneumonia pandemic. The country is preparing for deconfinement, but to deconfinate, tools are needed, including tracing which makes it possible to isolate the carriers of the virus and to warn people likely to have been infected. If tracing is debated in France, this is not the case in Korea and more generally in Asia.

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From our correspondent in Asia,

Digital disaster prevention and alert systems did not wait for the viral pneumonia pandemic in East Asia. If the tracing tools are commonly accepted by countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, it is because they are not completely new. These two risk societies [geopolitical risks - North Korea for Seoul or China for Taipei-, and natural risks] are often cited as an example in the fight against the epidemic.

For ten days, South Korea has not exceeded the 15 new cases of daily contamination, for a total of 10,752 people infected and 244 deaths since January 20. And for Taiwan, it's even better. Taipei has not had a domestic case for 14 days, and has only 430 infections and 6 deaths. And like South Korea, Taiwan is very digital.

“  When there is an earthquake that exceeds 4 on the Richter scale, immediately, we receive a message on our phone telling us to protect ourselves , explains Jean-Yves Heurtebise, lecturer at the University FuJen from Taipei. Another example is when, once a year, there is an aerial protection exercise, we receive a message at that time saying that, from such hour to such hour, one should not go out from home, you have to stay in the mansions  ”, continues the researcher associated with the French Studies Center on Contemporary China (CEFC).

Trauma…

These digital tools are subject to legal framework. In South Korea, the 2015 law gives the Korean Center for Disease Prevention and Control (KCDC) justice and police powers. The legislation was born in the aftermath of two major traumas for Korean society: the MERS epidemic in 2015 and, a year earlier, the sinking of the Sewol ferry which had resulted in the deaths of more than 300 high school students. At the time, a dysfunction was noted in the state chain of command of the emergency services. In the event of an epidemic, it is the KCDC and therefore the scientists who order the tracing of carriers of the coronavirus. The data is hosted on a server external to the State. And once made anonymous, they can be consulted on a public bank.

Interrogate everything possible to be interrogated ...  "

We are therefore far from Orwell, says François Amblard, physicist, biologist, director of research at the CNRS and professor at the Ulsan Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. In a way, if we mean by tracing the fact of sticking a bracelet to someone, a GPS under his car or a chip under the skin or in the phone, that's not at all what it is here. The tracing is strictly retrospective. Someone who is declared positive, the day the test result arrives, the person will be subject to a breach of his privacy over the past fifteen days  , "describes the author of two reports on the model of fight against Covid-19 in Korea.

This temporary invasion of privacy is legally permitted, even if the law also requires the consent of the person who is the subject of the epidemiological investigation. Faced with the rise in cases of contamination, the procedure was even automated on March 10. We enter the telephone number in the database, the authorizations are requested by the database from the police, the justice system, to go interrogate the bands, to go question the surveillance cameras, to go interrogate everything that is possible to question,  ”says François Amblard.

Some slippages

These digital memories are compared to the patient's memory, before being entrusted to the algorithms which make it possible to distribute this data to people likely to have come into contact with the infected person. The places visited are mentioned, the means of transport in particular, as well as the age and sex of the patient. When the person is tested positive, we can redo their social itinerary and we will contact people ," reveals Jean-Yves Heurtebise. Let me give you an example : we saw that a person had gone to a certain tourist place, so the government sent a message saying : all the people who were in this tourist place from such hour to such hour, if you have symptoms, please quarantine.  " 

François Amblard adds: “  The first day I had this kind of information, it was a Sunday morning in my elevator. On this poster, it was a woman and her husband. This person had taken the train, had come from not far from the small town next door, etc., and I knew exactly that they had taken the train two hours before me, on the same line, and I could see by compared to my schedule that I was not on this train  ”.

Alerts on cell phones or on the walls in elevators in South Korea. The system experienced some slippages at the start of the epidemic outbreak when the details of the route of the routes made it possible to know what they had ordered at the restaurant or what film they had seen at the cinema. The KCDC has since corrected this. The new directives on the collection and disclosure of patient data, updated on March 14, stipulate that "  personally identifiable information  " including personal and professional addresses must be excluded from public dissemination.

Full interview with François Amblard

Stéphane Lagarde

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