Chips with everything: including tracking the pandemic

As regular readers of this blog will know, as an academic, I have been both fortunate and privileged to have travelled around the world as part of my work. I have sometimes flippantly referred to these travels as ‘academic tourism’, but the reality is that more often than not such trips are hard work and exhausting. Now retired, I don’t have the same opportunities, although I was due to attend and present at a conference in Australia and one in Portugal this year, both of which have been postponed until next year because of Covid 19. I guess it’s unlikely I will now attend either. Life is different now and my enthusiasm for global travel is very much on the wane!

There are two places that I wish I had travelled to, which given a chance I might still do. The first is Israel and the second is South Korea. Indeed, we were planning on going to Israel for our honeymoon, as both J and I would so much like to see the various biblical sights of the Holy Land. But as our wedding has been postponed, the honeymoon planning has also come to a temporary stop.

I wanted to visit South Korea for entirely different reasons. Apart from the often magnificent scenery, much of which is mountains and rolling hills, I have long been intrigued by the history and culture of China, and Japan, and although I have been to both places, I’ve never had the opportunity to visit South Korea, which sits almost in between these two great countries. All three countries, China, Japan and South Korea have managed to preserve much of their heritage and culture, but have also been able to develop phenomenal industries, which are truly global in reach. South Korea is the 12th largest economy in the world, and the fifth largest exporter of goods, particularly technology, more of which later. It’s a very crowded country as the 55 million people tend to live mainly in large cities, due to largely uninhabitable mountains.

South Korea also has one of the best national health services in the world. Like the British NHS, it is free at the point of access. Its hospitals are extremely well equipped, with impressive doctor/patient ratios and beds per head of population. Interestingly, the health care system provides both Western medicine, and the more traditional oriental treatments. Many of the older population live with chronic illness brought about by the environmental pollution that was the consequence of earlier industrialisation, not to mention a culture where smoking was commonplace. Like the NHS, the South Korean health service is very much focused on treatment rather than health promotion and prevention, which in my mind makes their approach to the pandemic even more remarkable.

You may well have noticed in those Ministerial daily briefings, a chart that shows the flat line representing South Korea’s pandemic experience. Last Thursday, South Korean officials announced there had been no new cases of Covid 19, and Antonio Guterres (Secretary General of the United Nations) noted that other nations might do well to learn from how South Koreans had dealt with the pandemic. To date there have been a total of 247 deaths from the Coronavirus in South Korea. They have not introduced a lockdown.

South Korea had its first confirmed Covid 19 case back on January 20^th. The immediate focus was on testing the population. They were very soon testing 20,000 people per day, and able to rapidly identify those who were infected, but not necessarily displaying any symptoms. With reliable testing available, they were quickly able to adopt an extensive contact tracing strategy. In the UK we had to abandon this approach, as we had no reliable way of dealing with a growing and unmanageable amount of cases requiring contact tracking.  South Korea, on the other hand, not only asked people to record their own movements, using a smartphone app, but also used credit card transactions, CCTV and mobile phone tracing to monitor and track where people might have been.

It was a phenomenal piece of governmental intervention that will have Foucault turning in his grave. However, the intervention reflects the way in which new technologies, particularly digital technologies form the backbone of South Korea’s organisational, social and environmental way of life. Here in the UK, we are playing catch up with this approach, thanks both to population testing becoming more readily available and accessible, but also the announcement that 18,000 people will be deployed to track the movements of people testing positive for Covid 19. Like in South Korea, the general public will be asked to record their movements using a free automated tracking app. This app, when it becomes available is said to be able to record and track when users come into contact with each other. If one of these users develops Coronavirus symptoms, they will be expected to inform the NHS through the app. Such a disclosure will then automatically trigger an alert to other users advising them to either isolate or get tested.

Not everyone will want to download an app that they might view as the thin end of the wedge in governmental surveillance and possible control. It is estimated that for it to work, some 80% of the population with smartphones would have to sign up and use it. Personally, unlike the universal uptake in South Korea, I don’t think it will happen here in the UK. I was slightly worried, when this week, I was registered for my first NHS smart card. This microchipped card allows me to gain access to my payslip, mandatory training record and a wealth of other bits of information. But it’s a two way process of information exchange, and I took some time to read through how my data will be used. The information will also be available for 40 years after I stop using the card.

And from microchips to an infinitely tastier kind in the news last week. Food producers in Belgium, the world’s largest exporter of frozen chips, have asked that we all eat an extra portion of chips a week to help reduce a 750,000 ton potato surplus. Suits me, in the past, my favourite and oft eaten food of choice when I was travelling was chips and mayo!