Six on History: the 'Rona
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1) John Nichols on How “Coronavirus Criminals & Pandemic Profiteers” Hurt World’s Response to COVID-19, Democracy Now
Endemicity promises exactly none of this. Really, the term to which we’ve pinned our post-pandemic hopes has so many definitions that it means almost nothing at all. What lies ahead is, still, a big uncertain mess, which the word endemic does far more to obscure than to clarify. “This distinction between pandemic and endemic has been put forward as the checkered flag,” a clear line where restrictions disappear overnight, COVID-related anxieties are put to rest, and we are “done” with this crisis, Yonatan Grad, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard, told us. That’s not the case. And there are zero guarantees on how or when we’ll reach endemicity, or whether we’ll reach it at all.
Read: We’re not at endemicity yet
COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless
Rosy assumptions endanger public health — policymakers must act now to shape the years to come.
Endemicity, then, just identifies a pathogen that’s fixed itself in our population so stubbornly that we cease to be seriously perturbed by it. We tolerate it. Even catastrophically prevalent and deadly diseases can be endemic, as long as the crisis they cause feels constant and acceptable to whoever’s thinking to ask. In a rosy scenario, reasonably high levels of population immunity could bring the virus to heel, and keep it there; its toll would be roughly on par with the flu’s. As coronavirus cases drop from their Omicron highs in the United States and other countries, there’s at least some reason to hope things are bending in that direction. But at its worst, endemicity could lock us into a state of disease transmission that is perhaps as high as some stretches of the pandemic have been—and stays that way.
If endemicity contains a world of possibilities, not all of them good or even better, then it makes a poor goal, and an impractical conceptual framework for any action aimed at managing COVID in the months, years, and decades ahead. Simply declaring endemicity gets us nowhere. It doesn’t answer the real questions about what we want our relationship with this virus to be. And it doesn’t erase the difficult decisions we’ll need to make if we plan to shape that future, rather than risk letting the virus make our choices for us.
It is an unfortunate coincidence that the word endemic begins with end. The arrival of endemicity is actually the beginning—of a long and complicated relationship between a pathogen and its host population. En demos. In the people.
Exactly what kind of long and complicated relationship endemicity denotes, though, is impossible to say, even for experts. “It’s a very nonspecific notion,” Karan said. “There’s really no definition of endemic,” Emily Martin, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told us. And the word is so “muddy and misused” that it’s “really hard to pin down why someone is using it wrong,” Ellie Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told us. We spoke with more than a dozen experts for this article, and nearly every one of them explained endemicity differently.
For some, endemicity entails a disease with stability, constancy. For others, it means one that concentrates in a specific geography. Some think a degree of predictability is a prerequisite; some do not. Others still adhere to a more technical definition: Endemicity refers to a state in which over, say, a year, each person who catches an infection will on average transmit it to one other person, so that the overall case burden neither rises nor falls. Much of the population has at least some immune protection, and the spread of the disease is limited by the rate at which vulnerable people are introduced (or reintroduced) into the population, by birth or waning immunity. Think of a bathtub with water flowing in and draining out at the same rate. But some experts think that notion’s too strict: Any amount of sustained spread, however turbulent, can qualify as endemicity.
Read: The worst of the Omicron wave could still be coming
What experts do agree on is that endemicity is not monolithic. The water in that tub might be hot or cold; the level it plateaus at can be very high or very low. The world’s pathogens run the gamut. Viruses such as herpes simplex 1, which causes cold sores and, less commonly, genital herpes, are considered endemic throughout the world. In the United States, HSV-1 affects, by some estimates, at least half of Americans, though most of the infections are asymptomatic or not terribly severe, especially among adults. Malaria, meanwhile, sickens more than 200 million people a year, and kills at least 400,000, most of them under the age of 5. That, too, is endemicity.
Then there are flu viruses—so often held up as the paragon of endemicity, but actually a better example of just how absurdly confusing endemicity can get. In most places, flu viruses are seasonal, surging in the fall and winter, then subsiding in the warmer months. (They circulate year-round in parts of the tropics.) But they can also erupt into pandemics, as they did in 1918, 1968, and 2009, then tick back down. Flu is one of many examples that show why endemic can’t be thought of as the inverse of pandemic; the two terms are not opposite ends of a spectrum.
Flu viruses actually present such a bizarre case of boom and bust that many researchers don’t consider them to be endemic at all. The experts we spoke with were pretty much evenly split among saying Flu is endemic, Flu is not endemic, and some version of Who knows? or It depends. This set of viruses, the not-endemic camp argues, are just too erratic to warrant the label, even when flu doesn’t reach pandemic proportions. The seasonality seems reliable, but that may not be enough to count as stable. The magnitude and severity of these annual-ish cycles can vary widely; some strains will play nicer with humans than others. One year, a flu virus will kill about 10,000 Americans. Another year, it will kill six times that. The question of the flu’s endemish nature takes on an almost existential cast: What does it mean to expect something?
Others in the not-endemic camp contend that, in addition to being too unpredictable, the flu is also too global. An endemic pathogen, they say, must be restricted to a population in a specific geographical region, rather than “just everywhere,” Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told us. (The CDC agrees.) The Emory University virologist Anice Lowen, meanwhile, isn’t so bothered by the flu’s ubiquity. “I would call it endemic to humans,” she said. Martin, of the University of Michigan, doesn’t put herself in either camp. “Things get wiggly,” she said, “when you’ve got something like the flu.”
Pretty much all we can say for sure about the flu is that—as Malia Jones, a population-health expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told us—it is “a huge pain in the butt, but also not a global pandemic, most of the time. Unfortunately, there is not a single word for that.”
Endemic or not, flu might still represent our best benchmark for what post-pandemic COVID will look like.
Yes, okay, it remains true: COVID is not the flu, especially not while the pandemic’s still raging, so many people around the world lack solid immunity to the new coronavirus, and variants burst out at blistering speeds. In the past two years, COVID has already killed more Americans than any flu pandemic we have on record. But the comparison becomes less fraught when we project a lot further—a lot further—into the future. Flu, fundamentally, is another respiratory virus that’s enmeshed itself quite messily into our population. Which makes it, “with caveats, an excellent model” for what might happen next, Martin told us.
Such familiarity might feel comforting, because flu has come to seem pretty normal to us—most people can visualize, maybe even shrug off, its threat. We name a season in honor of the flu; we design drugs and vaccines to battle it. In most of the world, we expect flu infections to intensify in the winter, then trail off again. We expect the viruses to batter older and immunocompromised people at higher rates. We expect our flu shots to slash the risk of hospitalization but allow for less severe infections, which are especially apt to spread among school-age kids. We know flu viruses can shape-shift enough while brewing in human or animal hosts to bamboozle even experienced immune systems, and that several of those strains and subtypes can trouble us with some regularity. We live with multiple post-pandemic flus, among them a muted descendant of the virus that caused the deadly 1918 pandemic. We can’t know what COVID’s future is, but flu offers concreteness where everything else feels like mush.
Then again, SARS-CoV-2 is nothing if not a maverick, and it may warp the already disorganized template that flu viruses offer. Like flu shots, COVID shots seem to provide pretty stalwart protection against severe disease, and are arguably much more adept at this job; immunized people infected with the virus are swifter at subduing and purging it than the uninoculated. But the immunity we raise against low-level infections of both flavors has proved to be far more fickle, and needs to be somewhat frequently topped off. Both types of viruses are also pretty ace at splintering themselves into new and sometimes unrecognizable forms. These complementary trends—forgetful bodies, fast-changing viruses—push us to dose against the flu every fall. We could very well need yearly shots for this coronavirus too. Or not. We could still hit the point where a fourth or fifth dose of an mRNA shot, or the introduction of a next-generation COVID vaccine, will lock our anti-infection defenses on high. (But don’t count on it: That threshold of protection is very difficult for our bodies to maintain.) Vaccination frequency will also depend on whether we’re satisfied with preventing severe disease and death or aim to stamp out as many infections as possible—a higher bar than we’ve set, so far, in our anti-flu efforts.
Read: Will Omicron leave most of us immune?
How fast and how drastically the coronavirus rejiggers its genome also matters. Flu viruses and coronaviruses are different enough that they can’t be expected to engineer their evolution in an identical way. SARS-CoV-2 has already lobbed several very successful variants at us: first Alpha, then Delta, and now Omicron. The next globe-trotting variant could be a descendant of any of these, or none of them; it could be more virulent, or less. Like Omicron, it will probably be able to sidestep several of our immune defenses, and just how much slipperiness this virus is capable of is “the big open question,” Katia Koelle, an evolutionary virologist at Emory, told us. Maybe the virus is already starting to exhaust its flexibility. Or perhaps the pace at which the coronavirus alters itself will eventually slow as it runs out of super-hospitable hosts, as our colleague Sarah Zhang has reported.
And SARS-CoV-2 could still break the bounds of seasonality, and become a near-year-round threat in some parts of the world, or all of it, which would complicate how and when we vaccinate. “I feel convinced that we’re going to have a winter season of it every year,” Martin told us. “But what’s going to happen outside of winter is the big question—are we going to have summer surges?”
All of these factors—human immunity, virus mutability, and how and when host and pathogen interact—will shape our experience of COVID as a disease. We still don’t know what future COVID will be like. During the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 has packed a far bigger wallop than the garden-variety flu, prompting more hospitalizations, as well as a bevy of chronic disease. This gap in severity might lessen as population immunity to the coronavirus continues to build through reinfections and revaccinations, but maybe not. SARS-CoV-2 also seems to spread faster than flu viruses, so far. If that pattern holds, that trait, combined with a decent bit of immune-slipperiness, could mean more COVID than flu overall—both on population and individual scales.
The transition between pandemic and post-pandemic also can’t be expected to happen in an instant. We may not know what future COVID looks like until we get there. Given everything we still don’t understand, “like the flu” could actually be an underestimate of the twists and turns ahead.
Even if COVID somehow perfectly pantomimes the flu, that should not come as a relief. “What we’re basically saying is we’re accepting another disease that kills 20,000 to 60,000 people a year,” Grad, of Harvard, said. That’s on top of the many, many other microbes that may pile into our airways during the chilly winter months—respiratory syncytial virus, rhinovirus, other coronaviruses, and a glut of different bacteria, just to name a few. The health-care system already struggles to shoulder this load during the winter, Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard, told us. Increasing it “would not be a trivial outcome.”
Yet we’re not at the mercy of the coronavirus’s whims. The post-pandemic period is an armistice between pathogen and host, and that means both parties get to dictate its terms. “You can have endemicity and have a lot of infections, or you can have endemicity and have very few infections,” Karan, of Stanford, told us. “What we do is what determines the difference between those two things.” That, in turn, reflects “how much we care” about a given disease, Brandon Ogbunu, an infectious-disease modeler at Yale, told us.
Read: America is not ready for Omicron
Endemic diseases, then, are the shades of suffering we’ve accepted as inevitable, no longer worth haggling down. The term is a resignation to the burden we’re left with. It can reflect unspoken values about whom that disease is affecting, and where, and the value we place on certain people’s well-being. Diseases such as malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis, which concentrate in less wealthy parts of the world, carry pandemic-caliber disease and death rates. And yet, they are commonly called endemic.
COVID could follow suit. Already, rich, Western countries have enjoyed plentiful access to vaccines and treatments. They’ll inevitably find themselves best equipped to declare the crisis over first. But that risks concentrating COVID in the parts of the world least able to fend it off. Claiming endemicity can be a way of shifting disease to the vulnerable, and declaring these inequities tolerable.
The enormous range contained by the endemic umbrella also showcases how human intervention can affect a disease’s impact. We can usher in endemicity (or something like it) by hastening a pandemic’s end. We can reduce endemicity’s boil to a simmer, or entirely ice it out. The level at which a disease first lands doesn’t have to be where it stays. We managed to eradicate smallpox, a once-endemic disease. Polio is in retreat as well, though the COVID pandemic has set many efforts back. Measles, formerly endemic to the United States, now causes only very infrequent outbreaks among Americans, though it is still found in many places abroad. Even malaria, though still a long way off from eradication, has become more manageable than it was before, thanks to dedicated prevention and management campaigns that have equipped at-risk populations with better access to vaccines, treatments, and mosquito control. The World Health Organization has declared its aim to slash malaria cases by at least 90 percent by 2030.
Read: The coronavirus will surprise us again
Our window to permanently purge SARS-CoV-2 from the planet has already slammed shut; it’s too widespread, and too many animal species can catch it, and our vaccines are imperfect shields against it. We probably won’t ever eradicate endem-esque influenza either, for very similar reasons, Lakdawala, of the University of Pittsburgh, said. But between what we’re dealing with now and total extinction, there’s a lot of room to “reduce flu’s burden considerably,” she told us. For a while, we inadvertently did: The viruses that cause it all but vanished during our first full pandemic winter, thanks to the masks, school closures, and physical distancing so many people took on to curb the coronavirus’s spread. Preserving just a few of the least disruptive infection-control strategies post-pandemic, even partially, could greatly reduce the flu’s annual toll. COVID’s march toward maybe-endemicity is an opportunity to “reflect on how many different diseases are out there that are preventable,” Grad said.
Using the term endemic imposes a false sense of certainty on a fundamentally uncertain situation. “Everybody wants it to be simplified, but there is so much that we don’t understand yet,” Lakdawala told us. “We’re trying to cram it all into one word, and one word doesn’t cut it.” When we fail to consider the many possibilities that lie ahead—when we treat endemicity as unitary—the term becomes fatalistic. To say that the pandemic will give way to endemicity is to suggest a single end point; saying that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic suggests that what comes next is up to the pathogen alone. But the post-pandemic phase will be shaped by the choices and actions we make. If our future with it is a truce we strike with the virus, it’s one that we can renegotiate, over and over again."
"At this point in the pandemic, it’s clear the coronavirus has taken a disproportionate toll on people of color. Black, Latino, and Native Americans have been more likely than white Americans to be infected, hospitalized, and ultimately die of Covid-19.
But until now, it was unclear whether rates of treatment with drugs known to be at least somewhat effective—monoclonal antibodies, dexamethasone (a steroid), and the antiviral drug remdesivir—followed the same disparity trends. In a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scientists analyzed data covering more than 800,000 patients across 41 health care systems from March 2020 to August 2021. And the results are concerning, especially for the monoclonals, which have been shown to help prevent hospitalizations in high-risk patients.
Overall, only a small number of patients each month—4 percent or less, on average—received monoclonal antibodies. But there were clear disparities as to who got them: On average, Black and Asian patients were treated with monoclonals 22 percent and 48 percent less often, respectively, than white patients. Other races, including Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, were treated 47 percent less often than white patients. Hispanic patients were treated with monoclonals 58 percent less often than those who were non-Hispanic. In fact, during nearly every month the researchers measured, white patients were more likely than the other groups to be given the potentially life-saving treatment. This chart sums it up:
"Just this past week, COVID deaths hit an 11-month high in the United States, surging 11% compared to the previous week. While cases are finally beginning to drop, an average of 2,200 people a day are still dying thanks to the highly contagious omicron variant, bringing total fatalities in our nation of 330 million to 868,000 and counting.
Cut that any way you want: You can say it’s mostly the unvaccinated dying now, mostly the elderly or immunocompromised. It’s still a significant and tragic number. At that rate, COVID deaths account for a full quarter of what used to be the average of American deaths per day.
In full disclosure, I know both Bari and Bill. I like and respect them both, and I’m also a frequent guest on Maher’s show. But the conversation they engaged in over the weekend was one of the most self-indulgent, petulant and unaware I’ve heard in a long time, outside of outlets like Newsmax and kooky anti-vax rallies.
After Maher boasted that Europe’s decided to “treat [COVID] like the flu,” and therefore so should we, even though science says it is not like the flu, Weiss offered up her fresh take: “I’m done. I’m done with COVID.”
She went on to describe the great many, erm, sacrifices she’s personally made, leading to her exhaustion with the deadly pandemic that’s killed 5.6 million people worldwide: “I sprayed the Pringles cans that I bought at the grocery store, stripped my clothes off because I thought COVID would be on my clothes. I watched ‘Tiger King.’ I got to the end of Spotify. We all did it.”
Indeed, the boys of World War II are head-nodding in sympathy. Of course, “we all” did much more than that. We kept our kids home from school, we missed out on weddings and funerals, we lost jobs and loved ones, our lives were upended and put on hold. Many of us who survived got very sick and struggled with long COVID.
But none of that deterred Weiss, who still had some serious complaints, and very much wanted to talk to COVID’s manager:
“Then we were told, ‘You get the vaccine and you get back to normal.’ And we haven’t gotten back to normal. And it’s ridiculous at this point. If you believe the science, you will look at the data we did not have two years ago. You will find out that cloth masks do not do anything. You will realize you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant and still be asymptomatic and be carrying omicron. And you will realize most importantly that this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.”
It’s hard to unpack all this, because none of it really makes an argument that we should, for any rational reason, be “done with COVID” as Weiss is. It’s just angsty, teenage word salad that could easily have been checked by a willing moderator.
If she’s angry that we haven’t gotten back to normal, she should blame not “bureaucracy,” as she does, but the unvaccinated, enough of whom are still floating around to keep the virus and new variants alive and well.
None of her other grievances are arguments to stop caring about COVID either, but particularly not the way “the younger generation” is going to “feel” about this moment in history.
But it’s a funny thing about feelings.
Years ago, right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro popularized a phrase meant to mock liberal “snowflakes” for their overly emotional and irrational responses to policy problems like gun violence or climate change: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
But in the era of Trumpism, when facts became relative, alternative and often altogether fake, it’s increasingly the case on the right that feelings don’t care much about your facts.
There are reams of facts available to all proving COVID is still real and not “ridiculous.” It’s common sense to say continued mask-wearing and vaccines are the best ways to avoid getting it and spreading it.
This isn’t a corporate conspiracy, an assault on your freedom or political propaganda. And just because science has evolved over time, or even changed based on better information, that’s not an argument to reject science as untrustworthy.
We’re all frustrated, exhausted and want to go back to normal. Especially those of us who gave up more than just a few hours to binge “Tiger King.”
We should absolutely have grown-up conversations about COVID, what’s working and what’s not. Those should be divorced from politics and informed by facts. And they should acknowledge the deep losses we’ve all suffered.
No one was well-served by the child-like comments on Maher’s show, which sounded more like a cheap pander to the Fox News crowd than the thoughtful commentary Weiss is capable of.
Of course, her erudition on COVID – remember, she’s “done” — has been met with the predictable and deserving response on social media: Her supporters are #DoneWithCovid, too. So there. If only COVID were done with them, and us."
Son Eun-ji’s newborn son will begin the first months of his life in a sci-fi-like home in the middle of a sparse river delta that was until recently sprawling fields of scallions.
The young family will move early next year into an experimental project showcasing South Korea’s ambitions for the city of the future. Robots will patrol the streets, mow the grass and deliver packages. Homes will be powered by renewable energy, and excess electricity will be shared among neighbors or absorbed into the grid. Benches, streetlights and trash cans will be internet-connected and gathering data to optimize efficiency. Residents’ vitals will be monitored and an artificial-intelligence-equipped gym will offer health tips.
Sensors, meters and cameras inside and outside will hum in around-the-clock surveillance. The technology-laden “smart city” being built on the southern coast of South Korea epitomizes the daily bargain for most of humanity: the relinquishing of personal data and privacy in exchange for convenience, order and safety.
“The idea that you have any kind of anonymity is rapidly disappearing, in public spaces but also in private life,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who focuses on democracy and technology. “The way my kids now are being tracked, their medical information, the music they stream, what they watch, all of that is noted and recorded, and accessed in different ways.”
The trade-offs of this emerging world were foreshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, when cities and countries decided on how far to infringe on personal freedoms to protect public health. Some of the nations that pried most deeply into private lives to track infections managed to keep deaths low, curb rampant spread and prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed.
South Korean authorities relied on a panoptic software they had been developing to manage “smart city” projects — a dashboard to collect and analyze data to improve urban life. The platform was quickly repurposed into an epidemiological tool. It allowed contact tracers to target a person’s cellphone location data, credit card usage and movements in a matter of minutes. The rapid, meticulous tracking was central to the country’s widely celebrated success at pandemic control: Where the U.S. saw more than 240 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people, South Korea lost just 8.
But as the planet turns to the reality of living with the virus, the long tail of the pandemic will also include an accounting and reckoning over the intrusive technology that was deployed. Logan’s future is unfolding as revelations about government surveillance on citizens, corporate spying and data mining by Facebook and other social media platforms have raised alarm over who wields the power of technology over the globe’s 8 billion people.
“The pandemic marks a real serious inflection point for a lot of this.... Who decides when COVID has gone away? If it’s something that never really truly goes away, those technologies and those systems may never truly go away either,” said Jathan Sadowski, a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Australia. “As history shows, we very rarely go back to the moment before. Once new doors have been opened, people are reticent to close them.”
The question facing Logan and his parents — along with governments, tech innovators and rights groups — is how to keep the same technology that drives the benefits of “smart city” living from jeopardizing civil freedoms. When the streets are watching and the walls are listening, is what you’re getting in return really worth it?
Son, 35, got a taste of the rewards of opening up her life to strangers when she started a travel blog after quitting her job as a nurse around 2015.
As her blog gained popularity, she was offered free meals, complimentary hotel stays and an all-expenses-paid trip to Switzerland. It was a worthwhile trade. Documenting aspects of her life and sharing it online came to feel almost second nature. A couple of years ago, she began posting vlogs on YouTube, including some of life’s most intimate moments — when she got engaged, when she found out she was pregnant, when she broke the news to her mother, tears welling in her eyes.
The ad seeking people to move into a “smart city” project in western Busan seemed not far off from the way she’d been living, despite the extensive technological surveillance it would entail. She was already using a smartphone and a fitness tracker bracelet, and had installed a dash cam on her car, a common practice in South Korea.
She eagerly applied to move in with her sister, mother and soon-to-be husband, an English teacher originally from California, to join a five-year experiment on futuristic living in exchange for free housing. The family will be one of 56 households moving into what is eventually planned to be a development of 30,000 households.
Son’s budding family will be part of South Korea’s pledge to spend $8.5 billion of public money by 2025 in what has become a global digital race between tech giants and governments to create cities of tomorrow. In addition to revamping and building cities domestically, South Korea says it will export “smart city” technologies and platforms around the world, including proposed projects in Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Kenya and Indonesia.
Compared with their new home, the modest apartment Son and her husband, Nathaniel Kebbas, currently live in might as well be in the dark ages — the couple don’t have a smart speaker, security cameras or an internet-connected thermostat, and are still mulling over a baby cam for their son. As much as the technology that awaits them will be a major adjustment, Kebbas, 34, said as long as data aren’t used to coerce him into doing something he doesn’t agree with, he is comfortable living amid cameras and sensors. When he was a teacher back in Salinas, his classrooms were always monitored by cameras, he said.
“I’m an open book. Sure, in exchange for the living experience you want to collect some data, why not?” he said. “I feel like there is an exchange. Like a job, you exchange freedom for compensation. There is a trade-off.”
In September, Son went to sign the paperwork for their move-in. Listed over several pages, single-spaced, was the information she and her family were agreeing to share with the city’s operators and tech vendors: the grams of food waste they throw away; their blood pressure, blood count and cholesterol levels; the exact times they enter and exit their front door.
Signing on dotted line after dotted line, she felt a bit of uneasiness creep up at the long list of private information she was agreeing to share. But she swallowed it and quickly flipped through the pages, and in minutes, it was done.
“There is nothing you can do except embrace the future,” Kebbas said. “We’re starting off in a place where my son is going to be secure. It’s the first five years of his life, and it’s safe.”
For about a month in early 2020, Kim Jae-ho, then a researcher at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute, worked around the clock to retool the “smart city” data hub he’d been helping to create for South Korea’s fast-growing COVID-19 case control.
“All this data is one of the most important resources of a city,” he said. “We were developing technology to make that data flow seamlessly [into] ... a hub that collects, processes, stores, utilizes and serves up a city’s data using the internet of things, the cloud, big data and artificial intelligence.”
When the new epidemic control system was being rolled out, Kim began casually polling cabdrivers. What did they think of the government having almost immediate access to credit card data and cell tower information to track individuals to contain those infected with the coronavirus? He was surprised they were receptive and even welcoming of the tracking, if it meant they’d be alerted to potential infections.
“This system, more than any harm it may have caused, saved lives by preventing the disease’s transmission,” said Kim, now a professor at Sejong University in Seoul. “On the flip side, you could see it as privacy being sacrificed, but there was societal consent.”
Before the pandemic, the idea of “smart cities,” popularized by companies like IBM and Cisco in the mid-2000s to market technology to solve urban problems, encountered resistance in parts of the world. A Google-affiliated project to develop a waterfront in Toronto that proposed heated sidewalks and autonomous vehicles was scrapped in 2020 after residents questioned who would own the data collected and who would profit. But when intrusive technology was deployed against COVID-19, most countries did not have the time for a public conversation.
Such emergencies “can be moments where governments roll out new invasive forms of data collection and it just becomes the new normal, because in moments of crisis there’s a deeper allowance in terms of public trust and legal authority,” said Ben Green, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “There’s less of a sense of pausing for reflection, because there doesn’t feel like there is time when dealing with a global pandemic.”
Governments sought to assure citizens that heightened surveillance systems would track and manage only the spread of COVID-19. That line was blurred in some places. In Singapore, an uproar arose after police were given access to information from a voluntary contact tracing app to investigate suspected criminals. Dahua, a Chinese company that produces heat-mapping cameras to detect individuals with fevers, has dozens of public contracts in California. The firm, which also offers facial recognition software that can make racial identifications, has won contracts from the Chinese government for surveillance in Xinjiang, home to the persecuted Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority.
China is one of the most heavily surveilled nations in the world. Its companies and cities are also among the most ardent and advanced in developing, deploying and exporting such technologies. More than half of the world’s “smart city” projects are in China, according to a 2020 report by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
In South Korea, the city of Bucheon raised concerns this year over a publicly funded project to develop an artificial intelligence program using facial recognition to track individuals’ movements from camera to camera. The city said the technology would lessen the workload on contact tracers who were manually analyzing hours of footage. South Koreans had been living with QR code check-ins at restaurants and contact tracing with cellphone and credit card data, but the specter of facial recognition technology proved unsettling.
The city was flooded with angry calls and protesters camped out in front of city hall. Officials said the anxiety was misplaced because the software, still planned for completion in January, would follow only a known infected person rather than be used as a dragnet on the general public.
Kang Myoung-gu, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Seoul and director of its Smart City Research Center, said such technologies, driven by tech corporations whose profits are at stake, won’t easily be reined in.
“For politicians, they like the symbolism and the big promise that this one thing will offer this rose-colored future. For the vendor companies, it’s a business opportunity, a money stream. But what about the citizens and residents?” he said. “A city is a public realm; there needs to be high accountability and responsibility. But it’s driven by construction and IT interests, and loudmouthed politicians.”
Kebbas played around with a virtual fitness tool, shaped like a giant smartphone screen, that used a camera to analyze his physique and corrected his form. It told him he had good flexibility and above-average agility, but below-average core stability and poor balance. “I wasn’t entirely sure about having this collected, but professional athletes, they have that,” he said. “I can think of myself like that.”
Nearby, his mother-in-law stood in front of a smart mirror that cast her in different outfits that she may be able to purchase without having to leave her bedroom. A “master plan” for the village on one side of the showroom was full of lofty, specific promises: three years of added lifespan with improved health, 46% reduction in traffic accidents, 25% decrease in major crimes.
Son said she was excited to be at the vanguard of various innovations, even if the utility, necessity and privacy implications are still being worked out. As she thinks about what lies ahead for her young son, though, she has some misgivings about the technology, the environment and the future of humanity.
