Big Data in the service of the Ministry of Health or how modern technologies help fight the disease

Yes, here again we will talk about China, but instead of the same type of news about statistics and “eyewitness accounts” I want to consider the back-end of the grand Chinese system, which is put at the service of health protection in many aspects.
I admit honestly, I was prompted by the calls of a well-known woman in narrow circles "to help technology poor Chinese fight the epidemic."


The title picture shows the service 百度 地图 慧眼, literally - Baidu-cards, the Wise Eye. And the number of passengers moving from Wuhan to other cities as a percentage.
The first thing worth mentioning is the publicly available all-Chinese API from the Ministry of Health, which allows you to track the number of infected \ under suspicion \ dead - up to statistics on the province \ city \ district. From the user's side it looks like this

And from the back-end side like this

That is, in fact, a regular GET / POST request, which in response gives you statistics on the country \ province \ city. Due to the fact that this is socially important information, this API is provided free of charge with restrictions of 30 requests per minute and 100,000 free times. For an unlimited number of requests and updates, you will have to pay 299 yuan per year ($ 45), which, in fact, is also free and only reduces the load on the service, protecting from just the curious.
In the depths of the API, the receipt of addresses is hidden, the houses in which the cases were detected are visible on the map.
“And where about Big Data,” you ask indignantly. And you will be right. The buses on the front door and windows are decorated with QR codes that lead to the Wechat account of the Shenzhen Transport Administration.

By scanning it and confirming access to Wechat user information, we check in as a passenger.

The screenshot shows that a passenger at 12:52 boarded the bus on route B291, the bus license plate number is 粤 B41170D. As you might imagine, this covers not only city buses, but also intercity buses, trains, planes and any other type of transport. What is the profit? Yes, it is obvious - the doctor does not need to torture the patient "with whom you contacted", he sees everything perfectly in a form convenient for himself, on the map and with timestamps. And if you were traveling in the same bus with a sick person, you will then receive a message that you should visit the hospital and take tests for coronavirus (naturally, all treatment is free without restrictions).
How it works from user to Wechat in the back-end - I understand perfectly. Wechat Public Account has an API "Get User Information". You can get the nickname, the account itself and the phone number for communication. But what happens next, in the bowels of transport management and in what way this Big Data is analyzed - one can only guess.
Another great example of using Big Data is the collection of guest information. Those who live in a particular residential complex - they have a resident card, which they show at the entrance. Those who came to visit should register and leave information about themselves. Again - based on Wechat.

Having scanned the QR code, we find ourselves in the Mini-App of the Shenzhen Public Security Office.
* Mini-App Wechat`a is a cross between a website and an application running in a wichata frame. That is, we take the site, wrap it in a frame and feed it to Vichata, after which the user logs into it through Wechat without any installation, using the authorization API, obtaining user information, and everything else, and the application’s content and its functionality are loaded directly from your site .
After we got into the Mini-App - part of the information is picked up from the Wechat profile, again, through the API, we fill out some of the information about movements over the next 14 days ourselves, including the flight / train number and get the so-called健康 码 - “health code”, which will inform anyone interested in the fact that we have registered and nothing has been revealed.
This was established not only at the entrance to residential complexes, but also at the entrance to each shopping center, bus station, etc. That is, earlier it was possible to track exclusively movements in vehicles, and this helps to track the movements of pedestrians.

The importance for doctors is also difficult to overestimate - you can create objective displacement maps, and if infected are detected, respond quickly, interacting with the places you visited.
Three Mobile operators are also collecting Big Data. By going to cubigdata.cn (China Unicom Big Data), you can get information about the movement of the mobile phone user in the previous time - this is necessary to understand the movement of the user in the areas most affected by the disease.

Actually, on the part of the user, it looks like an SMS from the operator listing the regions visited during the last month.

Here, in fact, we are talking about the fact that over the past 30 days I have been in Beijing and Shenzhen. Well, also about the fact that I have been upgraded to China Unicom subscriber status to 5 stars-)
In general, you can’t list everything, and not everything has a front-end visible to the user. However, I can say with full confidence that to deploy a system of this scale, comprehensive coverage in a crisis, and, most importantly, really putting the latest technology in the service, not "fall off", but really using all the power of modern technology ... This can not cause anything except admiration.