Public Trust in Data Could Have Helped China Contain the Coronavirus
New crowd-sourced technologies can help us adapt more quickly to global health emergencies. Lack of public trust hurts those efforts.
As the coronavirus becomes an increasingly pervasive global health issue, many countries have struggled with the task of identifying and managing outbreak patterns. Current advances in data analytics could aid in limiting the spread of the virus. However, these new data-driven techniques for slowing — and even preventing — the spread of epidemics have not been deployed due to concerns over public data security. If citizens cannot trust that their data will be used responsibly, gathering the accurate and timely information necessary to drive these systems will be next to impossible. In a recent article in The Hill, our Executive Director Scott Andes unpacks the importance of transparency and the cultivation of public trust in crowd-sourced technologies.