Spread bet: China’s coronavirus quarantine

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Across rich countries, homelessness is on the rise, with one particularly notable exception, Finland. It has been following a policy known as housing. First we look into why it's been so successful and the precise way that your heart beats is as unique to you as your fingerprint. Now, scientists can measure these heart prints at a distance, a technology with uses ranging from public surveillance to targeted assassinations. But first, Today is the third day of the Chinese New Year, the middle of the Spring festival during which hundreds of millions of China's residents travel to be with family. Not so this year. In the province of Hubei, the epicenter of the spread of the newly identified coronavirus that's been causing global alarm, the capital, Wuhan and more than a dozen smaller cities are under an unprecedented quarantine. There have been nearly 3,000 confirmed cases of infection in China and more than 80 deaths. But only half of those cases were in Hubei, and it's unclear how much the lockdown of millions of citizens will prevent the virus spreading further.

It's still very early days, and there's still quite a lot that needs to be understood about this virus.

Mark Johnson is the Economist's Beijing correspondent.

Going from the confirmed figures so far, the death rate has remained reasonably steady at about 3% or so. That's a lot lower than SARS, a similar disease of which there was an outbreak in 2002, but that number could still move. Either way, it's likely that there are lots of people who are getting infected but never developing very serious symptoms. Equally, there may be deaths that are not yet counted. As far as the infection rate, what we know suggests that it is slightly more infectious than the flu, but not as bad as many other very nasty bugs. One thing that has been worrying people lately is that this virus appears to have a reasonably long incubation period, so it may take anything from one to 14 days for people to become symptomatic. And some of the early research has suggested that people may be able to pass on the virus even when they don't have symptoms.

So we've been hearing for some time that Wuhan is on lockdown, but not a whole lot about what exactly that entails. What are the measures in place?

Well, I've not been to Wuhan, but we've been talking to people there and I can tell you what they've related. Obviously, the hospitals are extremely busy and the government has been flying in doctors. It flew in 450 military doctors. It's also building two new hospitals away from the hospitals. People are staying indoors, so it's, I'm told, very quiet there. Lots of people have the usual kind of seasonal coughs and so on and so forth. And although a lot of those will turn out to be nothing, people are sometimes choosing to isolate themselves from family members. I think there's a growing sense that this lockdown happened very quickly and that some logistics of how it's going to work are still being worked out. For example, recently people in Wuhan were told that as well as the lockdown on public transport, they were no longer going to be allowed to drive their own cars around the city. It actually looks like that ban has been partially rescinded. So I think people in Wuhan are broadly supportive of the need for these measures. But if there's more dithering and uncertainty about how they're going to be provided for, I think they may get angrier quickly.

And what indication is there that these drastic measures are working?

Well, we don't really know whether this kind of extraordinary quarantine measures will make a huge difference because nothing like this has ever been tried before. There is considerable worry that a lot of people left the city in the days and the weeks before it was cordoned off, perhaps as many as 5 million people. And this isn't just that people were trying to get away from what could have become a bad situation. It's also that this is the Lunar New Year time. It's a week long public holiday, and huge numbers of people in all of China's cities leave and go back to villages and to family members who live in other places. The case at the moment is that half of China's infections are now not in Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. And indeed, there are infections in almost all provinces. In Beijing, where I am, the streets are quiet, people are preferring to stay inside, entertainment venues are closed, people are cancelling parties, they're downscaling weddings, and there's also travel restrictions in other places. So Beijing has decided that no intercity buses will leave or arrive from the capital. You also can't get a taxi intercity either.

Do you think China is responding in the right way to this?

I think people in China are broadly reassured by the way that the response has ramped up in the last week since the central government became very closely involved in it. I think people broadly see that there was a need to close down these cities and support the government in doing that. I think there is more anger at the moment being directed towards authorities in Wuhan and in Hubei Province. More broadly, there is a sense that perhaps they downplayed the crisis to begin with. There was a reason long period in early January where the number of confirmed cases seemed to be staying unusually stable. And there were a number of very large events that happened in Wuhan, big public, seasonal events that went on at a time when perhaps they should have been thinking about downscaling these things broadly. People have been rather shell shocked by how quickly this has all accelerated. It was only less than a week from a situation where they said there were only 40 or so infected people to one where of these cities were under unprecedented lockdowns. Then again, it's quite hard to know at this stage. International observers say that from a public health perspective, health authorities actually identified this virus very early and shared information with the international community quite early. So there's going to be a big debate about this. It's going to last doubtless for weeks. And it wouldn't surprise me if the central government in Beijing chose to make scapegoats of the authorities in Wuhan.

But, I mean, those are exactly the kinds of accusations and concerns that came up in the wake of the SARS epidemic. Is it your view that the Chinese government has done better with the knowledge that it had than it did in the days of sars?

During sars, the government was accused of sitting on this for months. I don't think there's any suggestion that that has happened this time around. And indeed, the central government has been bending over backwards to say that it is not like that. We are not doing the same. Some Chinese journalists appear to have been given a little bit more space, investigate this crisis and to cover this emergency in more depth than is usual. The central government has also set up a whistleblowing platform that allows people from all over China to report to the central government if they think local officials are not taking the emergency seriously or taking the Right steps. And of course, even during the SARS period, which was an extremely serious health crisis, there was never this unprecedented step of cordoning off these cities, not just Wuhan, but a dozen cities in Hubei Province too.

And what about the view from where you are about the international spread of this, the impact of the virus beyond China's borders?

Well, there are some immediate economic impacts. China has yesterday announced that it is not going to allow tour groups to travel anywhere, for example. So any countries in the vicinity that were relying on Chinese tourists are going to have a hard time to come. And from a health perspective, there are now cases in a little over a dozen countries. There are, for example, three in France, several in America, at least one in Australia. For the moment. The people who have been identified as carrying the virus there are generally people who have traveled from China and especially people have traveled from Wuhan. There isn't much evidence that there is transmission going on within countries outside China. Broadly, we can be satisfied that foreign countries seem to get information about this virus relatively early and that since the days of SARS in 2002, 2003, and the various health crises that have happened since then, countries have become much better prepared for this kind of eventuality. So those are all reasons for optimism.

Mark, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank.

You. Tonight, volunteers in New York City will attempt to count every homeless person across the five boroughs. Last year they counted over three and a half thousand. Across most of the rich world, the number of people without homes is on the rise. In the Netherlands, homelessness has doubled in the past decade, while in Ireland, the number of people in shelters has tripled. But in one country, that trend has reversed. Finland's population of long term homeless has fallen by a fifth since 2008, thanks to their novel approach to the problem, giving all the homeless homes. It's a policy known as housing first.

Housing first actually got started first in North America in the early 1990s.

Matt Steinglass is the Economist's Europe Correspondent.

In the US and other countries, you previously had what they called a staircase model of dealing with homelessness and shelter, where people would get put in overnight shelters or even long term shelters, but they would be expected to work out all their other problems before they could get permanent housing. So usually people with homelessness have some troubles with either long term mental illness or addiction, of course, and the idea was that they were supposed to kick those habits and get themselves clean before they would get access to subsidized housing. But the problem with that obviously is that it is quite Difficult to kick a drug addiction when you are, in fact, homeless. People who are in shelters are often exposed to violence because other people around them are also desperate. And so that means that people often prefer to actually sleep rough rather than going to shelters. And if they're out sleeping rough, then they're exposed to the elements, they tend to get sick. They might also be subjected to violence there. What this means is that it can actually be cheaper to give people housing first rather than expecting them to fix all their problems while they're still homeless.

And how does the housing first approach work in Finland?

In Finland, they committed to the housing first approach nationally in 2008. And that meant, first of all, that long term homeless people who were being housed in shelters were moved to from hostels, usually group hostels, to their own flats. They would pay for those flats with benefits that they get from the government. But they're usually sort of complexes where they have individual, very small apartments. I visited one in Helsinki where there are 87 residents with their own apartments. There are 20 staff making sure that the facility runs well. Every apartment has its own kitchen, but there's also a communal cafe that is run partly by the residents of the complex. And the social workers who are there keep track of each of those residents and make sure that they're not running into trouble with the rent payments, that their health problems are taken care of, their mental illness problems are taken care of. And the idea is to give them enough of a boost that eventually they might be able to graduate to leave that facility and go out and live on their own. A few of them do each year, but they try to keep their expectations pretty low. I mean, when I talked to the staff there, they counted as a big win that they had got one resident to stop throwing his trash out his window. What this means is that the number of long term homeless in Finland, which also includes people who are going to shelters every night, has fallen by a fifth to about 5,500. And there's basically nobody sleeping rough in Finland, partly because it's too cold.

I mean, this approach sounds quite sensible, but also quite expensive.

It requires an upfront investment. But on a per person basis, every country that has tried housing first finds that it saves money. In Finland, the studies show that the government saves about €15,000 a year, which is more than $16,000 in overall spending on each homeless person that it houses. Finland did have to hire a few hundred new social workers, and they've had to build a lot more subsidized public housing to make sure that people don't become homeless in the first place. In fact, in 2017, they built more public housing in Finland than England did, despite having a population just one tenth the size of. So in a small, wealthy country where you don't have a huge migration problem, it does seem like you can solve the problem of homelessness with the housing first approach.

Well, what about larger and perhaps less wealthy countries? I mean, is this an approach that can be scaled up?

It's true that in bigger countries, the size of the homelessness problem seems daunting. And part of the problem there is that homelessness is at the intersection of a whole bunch of different problems. It's about migration. It's about how fast you're building new housing. It's about how much social housing and affordable housing you're providing. And overall, in America, for example, homelessness is actually declining. But in San Francisco and in California as a whole, it's gone way up, partly because housing prices are soaring. It is true that if you start by addressing this problem, by making sure there's enough affordable housing, then you can shrink the problem down to a size where you might be able to tackle it with a housing first approach.

And so other countries beyond Finland are giving it a shot.

Yeah, a lot of countries have said that they're committed to the housing first approach. That includes France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. But in those countries, it's still sort of a patchwork of local initiatives here and there that haven't been fully knitted into a national plan.

And I imagine that it's also kind of a politically charged question in a lot of places.

Yes, it proved politically winnable in the United states in the 2000s under the Bush administration when it was sold as a low cost solution because it could be shown that it saves people money to give them housing. And in Japan as well, they had a big urban reform in the early 2000s, which has led to cutting the number of rough sleepers by about 80% over 20 years. And again, part of the solution is to increase social housing. That can often be a quite popular issue.

So it sounds as conceptually simple as providing more housing stock and then making it available to the people who need it.

Right. It's always hard to build enough housing to keep things easily available for anybody who needs a house. And frequently you get political objections from people who are struggling to pay for housing themselves as to why we should be providing free houses for people who are homeless, which is fair enough. I think the thing that one needs to keep in mind is that homeless people don't go away. They're going to be someplace. Either they will be on the street. No one likes that. Or they will be in shelters, which doesn't work terribly well. Or they'll be in encampments outside the city as they're starting to form in California. Or they'll be showing up at hospitals and emergency rooms if they can't find another place to sleep for the night. And all of these have costs. Those costs build up. Their costs to the police, their costs to the health system as well. And ultimately, the approach of housing first is sort of a least worst option. Get people a place to stay so they can work on their other problems and give them a chance to become independent.

Matt, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Before pulling the trigger, a sniper planning an assassination has to be sure the right person is in the crosshairs for that. Western forces commonly use software that compares a suspect's facial features or the way they walk to those recorded in intelligence databases. But that technology can be foiled by a disguise, a head covering, even an affected limp. And so a new system has been developed that, from up to 200 meters away, can identify individuals using a less disguisable measure.

Jetson is a device about the size of a boombox that can measure heart vibrations as they are expressed in clothing.

Benjamin Sutherland writes about technology for the Economist.

Each human heart beats differently. That's partly due to the different ways the muscles contract and the different morphology of the different heart chambers. And those differences are actually reflected in the heartbeat itself, which is reflected in the clothing. And what is just astonishing is that with a careful reading of the minute movement of clothing, you can kind of reverse engineer to figure out exactly how that heart is beating.

So what you're essentially talking about is a heart print, like a fingerprint, but of the heart. Is Jetson a new technology?

Jetson is based on an old technology which has been around for decades. It's known as laser vibrometry. And essentially it's an industrial kit which is used to detect vibrations and things like bridges, wind turbines, even in gearboxes, in internal combustion engines. So that technology has been around for a few decades. It works well. However, it's only been in the last five or so years that the technology has gotten good enough for them to be able to read heart prints, essentially in clothing.

And in a nutshell, how does this laser vibrometry work?

Well, laser vibrometry can work in two ways. One is measuring the time of flight. How long does it take a laser signal to Reach an object and return. However, that's not nearly precise enough for this use. So what they do is they look at the Doppler shift. In fact, if an object is moving, the reflected light beam will change its frequency slightly, depending on whether the object is moving toward the laser or away from the laser. And by looking at these minute differences in the frequency of the return signal, they can work out with some fancy software exactly how the object is moving.

So it's the same kinds of shift in frequency that you get when a police siren passes you, for example. But I imagine that the change is very, very small, no?

Yeah, it's the same type of shift you have in the pitch with an ambulance or police siren. It's a bit of a higher pitch when it's coming towards you, shorter wavelength and a bit of a lower pitch once it's pass. We're talking about very small differences here. In fact, the current state of the art with laser vibrometry is they can notice movements of about 10 picometers. That's 10 trillionths of a meter, which is not very far at all.

Okay, so let's wind back for a moment. The idea is that surveillance teams use this finely calibrated gizmo, point it at a target from some distance away and take a heart print reading that's then cross referenced with a database of previously taken heart print readings to check the identity of the person they're looking at.

Exactly. I guess in theory, you wouldn't have to have the person's permission to do it as you do with a fingerprint or a DNA sample, unless you're trying to sneak that from them. But the Pentagon is not saying exactly how they are gathering this information. And indeed, if they are using this equipment operationally, I think they consider it to be a sensitive matter.

And having worked out how to do this, does it have applications beyond the sort of the obvious? Well, the national security kind, yes.

There are a number of other possible applications. In fact, one firm, Maryland firm named Brimrose, is exploring opportunities to do clinical trials detecting heart irregularities, arrhythmia, other problems that could indicate you might need to see a cardiologist. They're also looking at possibilities of using the system to improve lie detection. Part of the stress of telling a falsehood changes your heartbeat. And they're also looking at a possibility of using the system for customs officials who want to identify people coming into an airport who are nervous and, and therefore might be smuggling something.

So if this can be done with great fidelity and at a distance and surreptitiously then surely that brings a whole lot of privacy concerns.

Well, it certainly does. In fact, one of my sources said that their lab had received a lot of interest from both China and Russia regarding the technology. I think that's probably something that bothers me more than the US Government using it, where there's a number of safeguards and very different constitutional system regulating its use. Of course, if once security services in China, Russia or other authoritarian countries start using it, then the game changes.

Benjamin, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.