Respond to COVID-19

This is not the only post you will find on the internet about it, I create a personal post here more as a personal reference.

Background

Facing the current COVID-19 situation and potential risks to our society and economy, I believe the governments are busy making tough decisions.

There are trading-offs between Test/Track/Quarantine and Lock Down policy.

Despite all the ‘controversy’ on social channels saying that social distancing isn’t needed. Some of our colleagues plan to work on a tracking project to help people monitor the difference.

On the other hand, people also worry about the city lock down completely (like Wuhan) might scare people out and generate more panic feelings, eventually generated society security risks when the resource are lacked. So what can we science out of the data?

One of my colleagues - Microsoft Machine Learning Leading Researcher John Langford has made some good research on this, I would recommend all the decision makers to read this blog post.

Hope this would help heal the society, and I believe the more people read this, the more they would understand the difficulty of the current crisis control and reduce the pressure on governments.

The current situation also keeps me up at night thinking how we can implement the Test/Trace/Quarantine in practice, so here is what comes into my mind: A social & economy recovery solution inspired by traffic lights.

Idea

Inspiration

Traffic Lights are signalling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings, and other locations to control flows of traffic:

• The green light allows traffic to proceed in the direction denoted, if it is safe to - do so and there is room on the other side of the intersection;
• The red signal prohibits any traffic from proceeding;
• The yellow light warns that the signal is about to change from green to red or from red to green.

To apply a policy of Test/Trace/Quarantine facing COVID-19 we need a similar control logic for our daily activities.

Plan

Solution

Detail

1. Yellow Light Status: Everyone goes through a Test x 2 within 48 hrs from certain authorized agencies to determine their next 2 Weeks social status, information will be recorded in QR Code and assigned to each individual.

2. Green Light Status: Once test negative, you are assigned a Green QR pass, you can go out and travel, pass will be expired in 2 Weeks, then you will need a new test to renew your pass.

3. Red Light Status: Once test positive, you are assigned a Red QR pass, you can not go out or travel, please stay home, rest and cooperate with doctors to recovery, this status is expired in 2 Weeks and you can require new test on demand after that.

Conclusion

I do think this is quite a challenge to our society, lack of the test kits may also make this approach less effective, however, we need to move the wheels of social life and economy again, at least at some point. So we need wake up as a crowd with a collaborative mindset, better sooner than later.

Thank you for reading, hope this will bring our society and economy back to normal. Feel free to leave your comment here and share with others! :)