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Abacus | Pet project: Would you get an implanted microchip used for pets to replace Covid tracking apps?
- In our new dystopian Covid world, tracking an individual is something governments, health services, employers and even airlines want to do more than ever
- If you could get rid of apps, ID cards and possibly passports in favour of an implanted microchip, like ones used for dogs, would you?
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Hong Kong’s government has been criticised for the uncompromising harshness of its efforts to track and try to eliminate Covid-19 infections – to the point where even old-age pensioners are forced to buy and learn to use a smartphone to dine out. Yet despite the backlash, the tracking of individuals’ movements has become commonplace during the pandemic, and not just here.
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Most countries have had a stab at contact tracing, with scan-as-you-go apps or even Covid-19 vaccine “passports”, with varying degrees of compliance and success. These efforts started as relatively simple apps, but have progressively become more advanced to now include the use of “artificial intelligence” for example in the Japanese app, to make sure you are where you ought to be.
Faced with dramatically higher infection rates because of the Omicron variant which often presents with symptoms you would normally ignore, test-obsessed Britain decided there was no real point to try to carry on with contact tracing – or even isolating. Some 219,000 new cases were registered on a single day in January. Everyone was getting infected and the country ground to a halt as no one would turn up for work due to mandatory self-isolation.
Any infected Brit could then just tell their family and friends to stay away for the newly shortened five-day self-isolation period, grab a pack of paracetamol just in case, and delete the tracking app and wait it out with Netflix. All self-isolation will most likely be scrapped in the UK by the end of this week as PM Boris Johnson accelerates plans to live with the virus.
For all the billions poured into tracing apps, many countries have followed the UK and given up on them, now content to just ride out the fifth wave. The upside for everyday folk is that they can just get on with their lives, although being far more cautious about where they go and who they kiss – including the family pet. This seems to be a new normal we will live with until this particular coronavirus is assimilated into annual flu virus jabs.
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