An app for that: covid surveillance

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Patrick Ley, filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. At the weekend, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson was sent to hospital with the coronavirus. In these uneasy times, the opposition Labour Party has just chosen a new leader. We assess the task facing Sakir Starmer. Often climate change is associated with extremes— floods, forest fires, and hurricanes. But there is also evidence of much milder but no less profound effects. We report on the northern hemisphere's missing winter. But first, To slow the spread of COVID-19, maybe half the world's population is now in some form of lockdown. The measures have already been effective in places like mainland China and South Korea, where the number of confirmed new cases has dropped to around 100 a day or fewer, while countries like the United States are still struggling to come to grips with the pandemic.

Asking people to stay at home and shutting down population movement is buying time.

And reducing the pressure on health systems.

But on their own, these measures will not extinguish epidemics.

As the transmission curve flattens, governments will face the same challenge: how to prevent another wave of cases once social distancing measures are relaxed. Some are turning to apps and data networks. Never before in a pandemic has there been so much technology to help keep tabs on its course. But this raises other concerns about effectiveness and privacy. If we're building a panopticon, shouldn't we keep an eye on it?

All over the world, different countries are going in and out of their initial spike of COVID infections as the pandemic spreads. And in the first wave of that explosive growth of the infection, digital surveillance is a bit less useful. Mostly you just need to shut people inside 'And quarantine anybody who you know is infected.' The extent to which it's used is to enforce that quarantine. Sometimes if those people are asked to stay at home, you can ask them to send a selfie to prove they're there, or report their location.

Hal Hodson is our Asia technology correspondent.

But more interesting for digital technologies is what happens after countries have squashed their spike of infections and are thinking about how to restart the economy and get people moving around cities again. And the most The most important thing that governments and techies around the world are considering when it comes to this problem is whether or not people's smartphones can be used in order to do what's called contact tracing.

And what does that entail?

Instead of having a team of human beings trying to track down everybody who an infected person has been in touch with, you would do that through networks of smartphones. So the smartphones would talk to each other in people's pockets as we walk around and keep a record of where everybody has been so that if I get infected, The data from my phone can be shared with a central database, and automatically, a list of all the other people that I've been next to can be generated, and those people can be told that they've been near me.

So Hal, in which countries is this going on?

The first country that started doing this was Singapore. In general, the East Asian governments have been very on top of COVID The Hong Kong government has a version of this, as do the Koreans. The Chinese provincial governments each have their own sort of contact tracing app. And now recently we've seen that the German government, in collaboration with a whole range of European countries, as well as the Brits through the NHS, are also looking into building and releasing apps of their own.

On the face of it, Hal, that sounds as if it's going to raise some fairly controversial privacy concerns.

Yeah, and it does. Something to note is that, at least in this first phase of responding to the pandemic— and this is very much my personal view— most people do expect that information about them and the digital infrastructure that is part of the modern world, smartphones and cell towers and computers— are going to be used to help cope with this virus. The most live controversy and the biggest question is actually about how you design these apps and how they gather the data and what they do with it. And this comes in two flavors broadly. One is that these apps track everybody's location and report where everybody has been to the Center for Disease Control or the human contact tracing team, and they can then use that data to quickly quickly find everybody who's been anywhere near someone who turns out to be infected. That's slightly less controversial. It does have its problems. More worrying is an app that completely automates the process of contact tracing.

And why is that more worrying?

So when you automate this, you start to get into some fairly thorny questions of how relevant the location data that is gathered through your phone actually is. So imagine, Patrick, that you and I are walking past each other on the street. Say maybe even we're both wearing masks and we don't we don't touch any of the same surfaces. Our phones could still register that we'd been right next to each other, and even though there was almost zero chance of infection, the location data that our phones had both gathered might flag us as, like, high risk of infection if I then tested positive through some other route. And for you and everybody else in, say, London who I've walked past to get a notification saying, "You are at risk of infection," the reason that's dangerous is twofold. The first is just that It might create unnecessary panic. And the second is that, as a result of that panic, all these people might seek out testing and overwhelm the testing system, which is already under strain.

And are people working on ways of weeding out those false positives?

Yeah. The first thing you can do is you can just limit the notifications to people who are at risk. What Singapore is doing with TraceTogether is they only register a hit or a co-location event if you and the other person's phones are together for 30 minutes or more. Ultimately, you need to figure out what are the relevant digital signals that you can get off a phone that make sense as a proxy for the biomechanics of actually getting infected, the virus passing around, moving from surfaces. And it's actually a very difficult problem.

Obviously, location alone isn't— is not enough. You get too many false positives. So you need some extra data. And that extra data, A, has to be relevant, and B, has to be the sort of data that people should be comfortable with sharing with the authorities or whoever's keeping this information. This does sound like a very tricky problem.

Yeah, it really is. And so one thing you could imagine doing, right, is just say we need more surveillance, we need more data. And so what you might do in this instance is, let's go back to that scenario where you and I walk past each other on the street. What if, as well as tracking our locations, we also were tracking automatically using machine learning through a camera mounted on the street that was watching both of us, we were tracking every single surface on the street that either of us touched. Now you're talking. Now you've got a good model. The problem, of course, with that— well, the first problem is that that level of surveillance doesn't really exist. And the second thing is that, as you say, that ups the stakes in terms of civil liberties. Like, then what have we got? We've got an automated system that can tell everything that everybody has done in public at all times. We start to have to make really big trade-offs in order to do that.

So we've got the immediate public good of wanting to curb COVID-19 without crushing the economy at the same time, and in the longer term, maintaining the privacy of individuals and the trust of individuals in the state. So how can that conundrum be solved, do you think?

We don't know the answers to these questions yet, and despite that, we're in a position of needing governments and private companies to experiment very, very quickly to figure them out. And we're not in a position where we can, you know, sit through an ethics review board application for a year and make sure that everybody's rights are protected up to the nines. For instance, Matt Hancock, who is the British Secretary of State for Health, he wrote a letter to basically the entire NHS on March 20th, saying, when you are using data to fight COVID, you don't need to worry about your duty of confidentiality anymore. COVID trumps your duty of confidentiality. And I think most people would agree that we want COVID to be the priority. The difficulty with that is is that if government is moving fast and powerful things are happening with the potential to be dangerous, the only way to make sure that citizens trust that process is for governments to be radically transparent about what they're doing. Otherwise, there is the risk that skepticism and fear and mistrust kind of snowballs into something that becomes as big of a problem in the fight against COVID as COVID itself. And we don't want to get to that place.

Thanks for joining us, Hal.

Thanks, Patrick.

To follow all of The Economist's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it is swiftly reshaping the world, visit economist.com/coronavirus. As in much of the world, coronavirus continues to dominate the public sphere in Britain. On Sunday, the Queen gave a rare speech to reassure the public amid the COVID-19 crisis, and an hour later, the Prime Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital with the virus. The news has overshadowed what would normally be a big political event in the country. After almost 5 years, the opposition Labour Party replaced the far-left Jeremy Corbyn as its leader with the more moderate Sir Keir Starmer. He won the three-way contest easily on Saturday with 56% of the vote. The Labour Party is an incredible and powerful force for good Together with those that went before us, we've changed the lives of millions of people for the better. Because of social distancing measures, there was no big campaign rally. Sakir's win was declared in a mass email to party members, and his newly elected deputy, Angela Rayner, was in self-isolation. Sakir's victory is widely expected to mark a shift back towards the centre. His early shadow cabinet appointments suggest as much. We've just lost 4 elections in a row. We're failing in our historic purpose. So Keir will have to unite the party and begin an electoral recovery. But he also faces a different and unusual political situation. In a time of crisis, national unity rather than relentless criticism is the order of the day. Under my leadership, we will engage constructively with the government Not opposition for opposition's sake. Not scoring party political points or making impossible demands.

Keir Starmer is best known to the British public as a former head of the UK's prosecution service. He was the public prosecutor.

Matthew Holthouse is The Economist's British political correspondent.

And as the Labour Party's spokesman on Brexit, where he was really instrumental in driving Labour to a position of supporting a second referendum on EU membership.

Now, as Leader of the Opposition, obviously, he's going to be the principal opponent of Boris Johnson. So how does he compare to Johnson? What sort of background does he come from?

You could say Starmer's background is quite distinct to Johnson's. He's from fairly humble origins. His dad was a toolmaker. He went to Leeds University. So he's, he's from a pretty typical perhaps lower middle class English upbringing in that respect. His hobbies are playing football and going to the pub. He's got a reputation for being rather dull and rather boring, which I don't think is very fair. He's actually rather charismatic, as you might expect from somebody who's been doing his job. The question is, I guess, whether that comes across to the public, and is there a public appetite for perhaps a more serious figure after the experience of Boris Johnson's government? What is clear is that they are quite two different personalities.

How did Starmer manage to win the leadership election so decisively?

Yeah, and it has, it has been a very decisive win. Reasons behind his victory are several. One theory that is advocated is that actually the party had become tired of losing and that it wanted to look for a figure who could pass themselves off as a prime minister. And Starmer, with his, his excellent sort of advocacy and cross-examination skills, the fact that he's held executive office was one factor behind that. The other factor clearly is that his support for a close relationship with the EU and/or a second referendum really has endeared him to Labour's membership, which is still pretty pro-EU. The third factor, which I think is very interesting for what's to come, is that he actually wedded himself quite closely with the direction of travel of the party under Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer supports the nationalisation of utilities and transport. He supports he believes in things like higher taxes on high earners and companies. He believes in things like the abolition of tuition fees. It's often seemed that the further left leaders go, the harder it is for the public to imagine them in Downing Street. Now, the rare experiment in Starmer perhaps is, according to polling, he is somebody that voters could imagine in that office. And yet he has positioned himself perhaps as far to the left as any leader prior to Jeremy Corbyn.

Does that mean he won't mark that much of a departure from what Jeremy Corbyn's done? Or is this partly what he's had to say in order to win the support of the grassroots in the leadership election?

That is the million-dollar question. Now, he said that the 2019 manifesto was overloaded, it's going to be pared back, there was simply too much in it. We could legitimately expect some of the ideas around, you know, the state taking a share of privately owned companies, or perhaps plans to nationalise broadband, some Some of those that the public found a little bit too much to stomach easily could be disposed with. The great change from Corbyn will be the professionalism of the party and the focus. One obvious example where he's very keen to make a clean break is his very early apology for the antisemitism that was in the party. And just the ability of the leader's office actually to put the government on the spot and really interrogate government policy and make life difficult for them, which is something that Jeremy Corbyn's operation really struggled with. Struggled to make a mark on quite often. You can see already on his first day in office, Starmer is issuing a list of areas where he thinks the government is failing on the response to coronavirus.

Now, that last area, presumably, immediately is the most important because we can talk about what the grand strategy of the party might be and what direction it might go in under his leadership. But at the moment, this is a time of national crisis, indeed of global crisis. How should an opposition leader, a new opposition leader, behave at a time like this?

This is a question which opposition parties around the world are grappling with. Starmer has been quite cautious and quite careful on how he approaches this. He said that his approach would be to support the government do the right thing. He would shine a spotlight on areas where he thought they were deficient, but the purpose of this whole exercise would not be politics for politics' sake, opposition for opposition's sake, but to do the opposition's part in the national effort to save lives. That's a very, very difficult balance for a leader to strike because the risk of appearing opportunist is real. However, if you look at some of the polling around what the public thinks about the government's response, whilst there is strong support personally for the Prime Minister, there is quite a lot of doubt in the public in terms of whether they think I think, for example, the government responded early enough.

Right. Now, Labour took a real hammering in December. Johnson's got a majority of 80. So Starmer's starting from a very disadvantageous point. On the other hand, he's got 4 years in which to turn it around and possibly to win a general election. What do you think his chances are of changing the political calculus in Britain and bringing Labour back into serious contention?

Starmer said that the party has a mountain to climb and they need to win 120 seats. The landscape will have changed though, because the Johnson administration was expecting to have a combination of an economy that was ticking along, complete Brexit, and then to fight quite an aggressive sort of cultural strategy, picking fights with, you know, the courts and the BBC and so on. That agenda really looks dead in the water in that, you know, the public finances are going to take an absolute battering from coronavirus. And the focus on the public is very much likely to be on public services, either the state of the NHS. That is possibly quite fertile ground for the Labour Party in that it will bring sort of Britain's middle classes sort of really face to face with some of the issues that Labour is very strong on. On the other hand, clearly the public finances are going to come under significant strain. And the question of what a left-wing party does when there isn't money to spend is a tough one and one that they have struggled with struggled to answer in the past 10 years.

Matthew, thank you very much.

Thank you.

To get a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to The Economist, a trusted source of information and, well, intelligence for 175 years. Just go to economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. Some of the effects of climate change are well known: an increase in wildfires, floods, and hurricanes. But it can also cause unusually mild weather.

The past winter was quite warm. It was the second warmest on record for the whole northern hemisphere, and on land it was the warmest.

Evan Hensley is a visual data journalist at The Economist.

Especially Europe and Asia saw a particularly warm winter. Temperatures from December to February were about 3.25 degrees above the 20th century average. That's about 6 degrees Fahrenheit and about 0.7 of a degree above the previous highs for those two continents. So neither Europe nor Asia has really seen a winter like this ever before.

So Evan, what did look like or feel like around the Northern Hemisphere?

Well, it depends where you are, but in a lot of places it felt very much like autumn just carried on. You know, in places like Boston where, you know, by January it's usually like 6 degrees below zero, it was barely freezing. And in Tokyo where it's normally about freezing, it was about 5 degrees. It's very much what like November what winter would have felt like 50 years ago is what January and February felt like this year in a lot of places around Europe and Asia, especially places in Russia and the Baltic had very balmy winters. Moscow is normally 13 degrees below in January, and the average this year, the average low was 2 degrees below zero. St. Petersburg and Helsinki had similarly warm winters.

[Speaker:GW] That's very dramatic. But as the world gets warmer, can we expect this to become normal? Can we expect a permanent autumn every year?

Yes and no. It's not quite that straightforward. There's a major weather cycle called the Arctic Oscillation that kind of governs northern winters. And that's determined by the pressure of air over the Arctic and over an area called the subtropics, kind of around the latitude of the Azore Islands. When air pressure is higher in the Arctic, it pushes cold air down from the North Pole over Europe, Asia, North America, and that can lead to very cold winters like the Beast from the East we saw a few years ago, or the polar vortex that hit North America. But when the pressure is higher towards the subtropics, it forms this fast-moving band of air that keeps cold temperatures hemmed in around the pole. And that whips warmer, wetter weather from the more temperate latitudes up and keeps the winter warm across most of the Northern Hemisphere. And that's what happened this year. The Arctic Oscillation was particularly strong towards the high pressure in the tropics this year, which led to a really warm winter.

And the question that'll be on a lot of people's minds is what role climate change is playing in all this.

Climate change really made this winter possible. It's not clear to researchers quite how it's affecting the Arctic Oscillation. People used to think a few years ago that it would make it more likely that cold air would come down from the poles during the winter, and now they think it's the opposite. But moreover, global warming is making warmer winters possible by just raising the temperature on everything. So in 1950, a winter this warm basically couldn't occur. The chances are are incalculably small, whereas by this year it was about 1 in 11 chance that we'd have a winter this warm. By mid-century, it could be a standard winter or even a slightly cold one.

Now some people might say that it's actually no bad thing to have a warmer winter. I mean, given the choice between a winter at -13 and a winter at -2, I know what most people would choose. What are the benefits and costs of this?

Well, it does have benefits. Certainly warmer weather helps to reduce heating bills and it cuts down on flu season, but there are downsides as well. The warmer winters are usually wetter, which can risk floods, and the change in rain and snowfall patterns can also affect the snowpacks that feed rivers and irrigation systems and lead them to dry up. And also, without hard frost where it gets down below, you know, 2 or 3 degrees below zero, a lot of pests can survive the winter and go on to multiply and be more aggressive in attacking crops the next year. So a warm winter like this can mean a poor harvest the next summer.

It's quite dramatic and quite scary. Big numbers. Thanks very much, Ed.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. Jason Palmer will be back tomorrow. Please join him then.