Breaching the Corona Virus Chakravuyh

In this global pandemic, the decisions that leaders take have potential to shape the world for many years to come. The lock out situation to create deliberate social distancing is already into its 8th week in India. To combat the pandemic, the decisions revolve around creating awareness, extent and manner of testing, setting guidelines for health care professionals, target infection clusters, limit movement, contact tracing, providing shelter and food for migrant workers stuck in urban cities, and allocate limited resources. These decisions will influence how many people will survive and how many will die over the coming days, weeks and months. Leaders must act quickly and decisively in order to save lives.

Availability of right data has a vital role to play in getting the basis of this decision-making right. However, there is lack of high-quality data to resolve some of the key questions at the moment. Tracking population movement and contact tracing has been seen as a pivotal key to prevent the spread, to estimate the spread between highly vulnerable communities such as urban ghettos.

Each country faces unique challenges in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic. Several models have emerged in the last 4 months. It would be worth mentioning that a model can be considered successful if it is able to protect its citizens from Covid-19 in the short term and from its economic impact in the long term.

There are so far 3 distinct models that one could see emerging. East Asian Model (China, South Korea, Taiwan) of strict lock-down followed by gradual opening up of the economy, The Sweden model of no lock down and following evidence based principles of taking care of the most vulnerable population (elderly and other population shown to be impacted disproportionately by Covid-19 in terms of mortality and morbidity) and Rest of the world. In rest of the world model of strict lock-down, moderate success has been seen in many countries in flattening the curve. The economy however has brought the country to the brink. Further there seems to be no strategy to come out of a lock down to come to normalcy of economic activity. This is because, in the current interconnected economic and financially intertwined globalized world, even if a country is able to control the disease, the country can’t open up else it goes into an iterative lock down when it imports a positive case. So long as there is disease out there, this model is like a Chakravuyh wherein you can go in but very few can figure out how to get out. Sadly, there are more Abhimanyu’s who are venturing in out of bravery but very few Arjun’s who know hot to get out.

India’s relatively low healthcare resources, limited state capacity, and large population of poor people, many of whom are already burdened with other health issues, pose challenges on every dimension. Even washing hands, for example, is not easily accomplished when hundreds of millions of people do not have access to piped water or soap.

We all now know that India followed model 3 (Entering the Chakravuyh) very early on about 8 weeks back. The cases continue to explode across the country despite the harshest economic lock down that this country has seen in its independent history. And there seems to be no game plan, strategy or clue that anyone has on how to get out of this.

The present policy of a countrywide lock-down has imposed enormous stress on the poorest Indians. Indian hospitals were already overcrowded and doctors overworked, and a large number of Covid-19 patients would collapse the healthcare system has been the logic used. Also, testing at a large scale is difficult given current capacity, and social distancing and isolation are difficult given India’s low per capita living space.

Can this Chakravuyh be breached?

The good news is that unlike pandemics in the past, there is one vital difference. The current technology available to humans is far advanced than any other generation in the past. Take for example, the pervasive presence of mobile phones and smart phones.

As the world struggles with the Covid-19 outbreak, Asian countries are galvanizing every digital tool at their disposal to curb the spread and better manage the evolving pandemic. Using digital contact tracing, governments have begun a massive exercise of tracking people’s movement via their smartphones and identifying all those who may have come in close contact with confirmed cases, says GlobalData, a leading data analytics company.

In China, the National Health Commission launched an app named Close Contact Detector. Accessible by scanning a QR code through platforms such as QQ, Alipay and WeChat, the app worked on the principle of monitoring proximity through Bluetooth and location data and allowed people to identify whether they are at the risk of being infected. Similarly, Corona 100m in South Korea, alerted individuals by sending them notifications if they came within a range of 100 metres of a Covid-19 patient.

Should it be India?

India launched the Aarogya Setu app on 2 April. Downloaded by over 50 million users, the Aarogya Setu app uses a phone’s location data and Bluetooth technology to identify people who have come in contact with a patient under quarantine. Compared to manual identification, contact tracing apps are less prone to errors and take less time too.

While the solution seems to be knocking the right door of the Chakravuyh, a different data statistic shows that Aarogya Setu may not be able to breach it yet.

The mobile phone penetration in South Korea is 100% with smart phone penetration at 95%. In China the numbers are 98% and 68%. On the other hand, the current mobile phone penetration in India is 54% and Smart phone penetration is just 24%.

This tells us that India may not be ready yet to adopt what’s working in China and South Korea given the massive difference in technology penetration as it stands today.

However, it also tells us that if the penetration of mobile phones and smart phones can be elevated, one part of the Chakravuyh can be breached. The decision that the government hence needs to reflect on is what does it take to increase smart phone/mobile phone penetration in rapid fashion. Should it be dispensing mobile phones for FREE to all its citizens who don’t own it yet?

India runs on its mobile phones and needs to keep them up and running. Since mobile phones can be used for a range of solutions related to Covid-19, an important policy intervention is to keep mobile phone accounts alive even if the phone bills are not paid. Similarly, private companies or the government should provide a subsidy for pay-as-you-go account holders so they can use mobile phones to access a range of other goods and services. The easiest method would be to allow private mobile phone companies to use their government-mandated corporate social responsibility funds to keep mobile phone lines alive for those facing economic hardship.

Let it sink in.

This decision of giving away mobile phones and keeping them perennially active, if government were to take it will not only help breach the current Chakravuyh door but also pave a way for a technological revolution in the long term. In what Facebook and Jio are trying to do, Government potentially can do one up. However, there are more doors to be breached before this solution helps kickstart the once-vibrant-and-now-dead-economic-engine.

Once the data starts getting generated, machine learning and AI technologies could assist researchers to predict the virus, its structure and its spreading methods

For the scope of current discussion, I am not going to go in detail about the tech revolution and an extremely strong economic bounce back that this connectedness can potentially create.

Privacy Dilemma – Another Vuyh to be breached.

The strategy of using technology to fight corona virus intersects with individual privacy and liberty as it involves pervasive citizen surveillance. And this isn’t a black-and-white choice between personal liberty and saving lives.

While the capacity of big data to help curb the corona virus outbreak is, a work in progress, its risks to privacy are immense. Several studies have shown that location data is particularly vulnerable, since it can be combined with public and private records to create an intricate and revealing map of a person’s movements, associations and activities. It could potentially be used as a new means of social control to restrict people’s movements or stigmatize, isolate or exile people later.

Perhaps health is more important than privacy and civil liberties. Obviously, you'd have absolutely no civil liberties, freedoms, or powers if you were deceased.

Hence, there must be a strong governance on the limits on data collection and use, and independent oversight. This could be helpful for epidemiologists modeling transmission of the virus, and the effects of social distancing.

As new technologies emerge that aim to collect, disseminate and use data in order to support the fight against Covid-19, we need to ensure they respect ethical best practices. Even in times of crisis, we need to comply with data privacy regulations and ensure that the data is used ethically.

One way to do that is to establish independent ethical committees or data trusts. Their role will be to create data governance mechanisms to find the balance between competing public interests, while protecting individual privacy. Examples of such rules include setting up clear guidelines on the purpose and timeline for the use of the data, defining clear processes for the access, processing and termination of use of personal data at the end of the crisis.

The right information in the hands of the right people can save lives in a time of crisis. It will be essential to ensure that such health surveillance measures will not prevail beyond the extreme circumstances we are facing today, so that people do not feel they are losing their privacy in a new world order.

Even so, it isn’t remotely a magic bullet. All other solutions of wearing masks, social distancing, having better sanitation facilities, proper and frequent hand washing, rapid testing, preparing and ramping up healthcare facilities would still be needed to solve the puzzle.

Social Distancing: The next Vuyh to exit the Chakravuyh: The hardest one to breach.

Once data shows patterns and spread of Contagion, people in the country would need to know how to exercise self-discipline of isolating themselves if they are in medium or high-risk category. Government would need regulatory framework (Not the 1897 Epidemiology act that is being used today) to enforce such behavior by a combination of incentives and coercion such as availability of essentials when self-isolating and jail terms if found violating. This is critical as one person’s behavior can a have a viral impact to lock down and paralyze the entire economic activity of an entire community.

When we think of what makes someone a great leader, one key characteristic that one looks for is decisiveness. An unclear or uncertain leader appears weak and non-inspiring. There could not be a more testing time than the current one for leaders to shine through.

Decision making in complex situations is never easy. And in critical situations, the cost of getting it wrong can be devastating.

Hence effective leaders are not just intuitive but also analytical in their understanding of situations. They identify critical factors impacting key outcomes, evaluate competing options and establish priorities, anticipate outcomes and their consequences, navigate ambiguity and envision future scenarios to arrive at their decision.

In the present case,

1.     The decision to take is that of creating meaningful data through increasing smart phone penetration

2.     Policy frameworks around it to balance privacy, data protection and larger community good

3.     Regulatory frameworks to implement adherence

This would go a long way in breaching the Chakravuyh where we are all stuck.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration

https://www.statista.com/statistics/539395/smartphone-penetration-worldwide-by-country/

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/technology-media-telecommunications/us-global-mobile-consumer-survey-second-edition.pdf

https://mahabharata-research.com/military%20academy/the%20mysterious%20chakravyuha.html

https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/international/china-using-wechat-twitter-to-track-people-sharing-covid-19-info

https://yourstory.com/2020/03/coronavirus-china-covid19-wuhan-hanson-hu

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/technology/coronavirus-smartphones-surveillance.html

https://www.mercatus.org/publications/covid-19-policy-brief-series/pandemic-policy-developing-countries-recommendations-india

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/role-data-fight-coronavirus-epidemic/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/04/09/the-vital-role-of-big-data-in-the-fight-against-coronavirus/#20812d103806

https://www.cxotoday.com/news-analysis/using-big-data-to-fight-the-coronavirus/

https://hbr.org/2020/04/fighting-coronavirus-with-big-data

https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-fight-the-coronavirus-with-ai-and-data-science-b3b701f8a08a

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/can-big-data-fight-pandemic

https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonchandler/2020/03/23/coronavirus-could-infect-privacy-and-civil-liberties-forever/#7d34446f365d

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK54163/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-individual-liberty-common-good-not-in-tension/

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/04/16/app-based-contact-tracing-may-help-countries-get-out-of-lockdown

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/innovating-from-necessity-the-business-building-imperative-in-the-current-crisis?cid=eml-web

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/30/life-after-lockdowns