Coronavirus crisis must be managed not only from a Sanitary perspective but also from a Financial one.
Definitely, if people don’t have money to pay the Healthcare system, it can collapse (a non-linear risk scientists and doctors must think about), consequently ways to reopen the economy, mitigating the health risks for people, must be found.
Tracking devices and systems are showing to be effective in slowing down the spreading among the population, increasing indirectly the probability the virus crisis will be solved by a vaccine instead of a “population immunity”.
Also, the social distancing, since the virus is spread principally by people, is the fundamental variable to work on to influence the “R” parameter (the average number of people infected by one infected).
In doing this, it is incorrect to assume people are rational/disciplined enough to follow all the rules, and the environment of action must be designed to shape the people behaviours in the correct direction.
Consequently using tracking devices and technologies can be supportive to incentivize people to follow an optimal behaviour, since the more people they met, the higher would be the probability to be subjected to quarantine.
In fact, assuming a beacon “bracelet” is available to each individual, with a standardized Bluetooth protocol and an Independent Hash (that can’t be associated with the Individual directly, making it difficult to “spy” or reconstruct the connection history, since the codes are collected from the bracelet only if you result infected – tracking only when necessary and not all time), an incentive to remain distant from other people is created.
The basic principle here is to incentive people, with a credible and effective system, to stay far from each other, using also a “contact credit system“: inside the bracelet, a counting system would allow signalling (for example with a colour on the screen) the number of people met the last 7 days, giving an idea of the level of risk bring from each individual inside the working place or a customer area.
Reaching a certain level of risk would mean to be prevented to access to a certain area (also this level is influenced by the risk of the people you met, to allow to pay ulterior attention in the social contacts) and also would allow others to receive alerts (other people can receive some signals from their devices regarding the presence of someone with a high level of risk).
Indirectly people would pay much more attention to the number (and the type, according to the individual risk) of people they are in contact with, allowing at the same time the possibility to reopen the productive system.
Using this GovTech solution would it be possible to reopen/close the economy as a function of the effectiveness of the “contact limit” on the R score.
For example, it can be increased the score limit to access the facilities (indirectly increasing the number of Business Customers) until R score is not moving ulteriorly, minimizing the impact on the Businesses (that need a Beacon tool to validate the entrance ).
A score limit of 100 means that you can go around freely until you don’t reach 100 people contacts in the last 7 days and after you can’t enter anymore to all the unnecessaries facilities (until the score doesn’t lower).
A score limit of 0 would mean total quarantine (since the family and people living in the same house would have a shared score).
And the government can manage easily the social distancing system according to the R behaviour among time, minimizing the total costs for the Economy.