Barclay Bram writes:

Xu Jiao was anxious to get back in the gym. Living in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, she had gone through two months of lockdown. The pandemic hadn’t been particularly bad in the city. To date there have been 144 confirmed cases and three deaths, according to official statistics. Still, as with much of China, the lockdown had been severe. Almost everything had been closed and Xu Jiao, in her mid-30s, had to show a pass at the gates of her residential community every time she wanted to leave her apartment building. She would have her temperature checked upon leaving and returning, which would be logged by the security guards.

China is sometimes said to offer a glimpse of the West’s post-lockdown future. Xu Jiao’s life is now back to normal. A committed athlete, she works out every morning for a few hours at her local gym. While the rest of the economy in Chengdu had slowly started to open back up in the first weeks of March, it was only in mid-April that gyms were allowed to start again. But there are differences. The staff at the gym all wear masks. Cleaners disinfect the equipment regularly. People have to bring their own towels. When Xu Jiao enters the gym, she said, “They usually check my Health Code, and they always take my phone number and government ID, as well as my temperature.”

One of the key factors that has allowed China to start to regain a semblance of normality is the fact that the government has instigated mass-scale testing. Testing is easily available for people to determine whether they have the virus, and many employers expect to see a negative result before a person is able to return to work.

The Chinese government has teamed up with major tech companies Alibaba and Tencent to issue QR health codes that show a person’s exposure to the virus. To obtain the code, people must use one of China’s widespread apps like WeChat, submit their national ID (or passport), recent travel history, whether they’ve crossed paths with anybody with COVID-19, or suspected of having it, and answer a host of questions about their health that you might see on a doctor’s-office questionnaire. Once the information is verified, people are assigned a color code that flashes green, yellow, or red. The colors signal whether a person has tested positive for the virus and whether they may have been recently exposed and need to take themselves out of society. The app gives us a view from China that might help us understand a potential future for ourselves, as tech interventions have been touted in the West as one route out of lockdown. [Continue reading…]