Coronavirus, Remember, 19.

19. "THE COLOR OF YOUR QR CODE" Tuesday April 7, 2020. We remember the Diamond Princess, (Journal 2 and 3), this fabulous cruise ship 290 meters long which cruises, at the end of January 2020, in the scintillating night of the China Sea. On board it is the intoxication of happiness, with swimming pools with magical slides, casinos where you tirelessly throw your chips, gin and tonic bars, panoramic cinemas. Nothing is too much to satisfy 2,674 cruise passengers - 750 of which have sea balconies - served by 1,238 people. All from 50 different nationalities ... On January 31, passengers disembark at Keelung, Taiwan for an excursion. But on February 1, the ship was quarantined on the island of Okinawa - an 80-year-old man shows alarming symptoms. We remember that during this month of January, the coronavirus is dispersed, case by case, in 23 countries. It reached 5,974 cases in China, with 132 deaths - The number of cases in France, March 16 ... 1 and a half months later. With a first case of Covid19 on January 22 - a Taiwanese national returning from a stay in Wuhan -, and the bad memory of the SARS epidemic of 2002-2004 (346 infected and 37 dead, for a total epidemic of 8,000 infected for 774 dead), the Taiwanese set to work to trace the route of cruise passengers on their soil. With legal foundations, the contagious diseases center, via telephone operators, collects all signals from transmitters and relay antennas. Using algorithms, they isolate the customers of the Diamond Princess, then find the digital fingerprints of the roaming phone numbers and list the ten tourist spots frequented by cruise passengers. Then they issue an alert to 7 million people who have potentially crossed paths with tourists ... unheard of. In Taiwan, this electronic platform is also used to monitor 53,000 patients in quarantine. If the patient does not respond, an alert message is sent, then the police disembark. Strangely enough, it is the citizen hysterized by the disease who demands this type of protection. In Wuhan, healthy Wuhan people can go out again, but they have to download their “QR” code to their cell phone. The color of the QR code varies depending on the trip. Green, it means you have not seen any infected. But if by misfortune you “cross” an infected one, and several, on your way of Red Riding Hood, the color changes: to “orange / red”, rebelote for quarantine! It can make a packet of cigarettes expensive! What sauce will we eat in Europe? In Spain Telefónica, Orange and Vodafone are carrying out an “anonymous” mobility study. “Anonymous” means that we use your data, but “washed” your identity - like: “she's going on a trip to Cape Verde, we don't know her age, but she has a flowered swimsuit bought February 4 at Corte Inglés ... » 3,200 mobility areas of 5,000 to 50,000 people will thus be defined in Spain. Hey ... isn't that territorial coverage? In France, the project would be similar to that in Germany: on a voluntary basis, we receive information on proximity to the disease ... As the journalist-essayist Olivier Tesquet so aptly puts it, “the providential Big Brother becomes more than ever the Platonic pharmakon, the poison and the remedy. "