The Center for Health Protection announced that after the outbreak of the new crown virus in the Wangyuelou group on the 27th of last month, six diners were still unable to be contacted for mandatory testing until Monday (3rd).
The incident revealed that the lack of infection tracking in "Travel with peace of mind" is a loophole in the program, which hides the risk of community transmission, and both the government and the people must now learn a lesson.
In an interview with a radio program on Monday, Director of the Food and Health Bureau Chen Zhaoshi said that the government has sent most of the customers who ate at the same time as the infected crew to the quarantine center, but there are still some diners who have not been found, partly because they are waiting to be seated at the scene. , Some are waiting for credit card companies to provide information, urging them to contact the Center for Health Protection as soon as possible.
"Travel with peace of mind" could find all the diners
The government could have used "Travel with peace of mind" to find all diners at the same time.
Earlier, the government required all diners to also log in to the app. If the government would require citizens to register with their real names earlier, they would also need to go online every day to compare the locations of the citizens and the confirmed persons. When a citizen is one or two days after the incident If they still evade compulsory testing and quarantine, the government can contact them directly, or even make them wanted for violation of anti-epidemic regulations.
In this way, the entire identification of high-risk individuals can take a shorter time to block the transmission chain and work more efficiently, and the process of checking credit card transactions can also be omitted, or only for reference purposes.
A person wearing protective clothing investigated and disinfected the Wangyue Tower.
(Photo by Zheng Qiuling)
Government expert advisor Yuan Guoyong recently lamented that the local contact tracking technology is very backward.
However, it is definitely not difficult to develop relevant technologies. The problem is that a considerable number of citizens still refuse to provide travel information to the government, questioning that the government will have other uses after obtaining the information, and the government also felt certain resistance before the outbreak.
Credit card transactions actually contain a lot of personal information, but the dissatisfaction of restaurants in the market is less than the dissatisfaction of the government in obtaining personal information in "Travel with peace of mind".
Political measures for people's livelihood are difficult to advance without mutual trust
The public’s skepticism is mostly due to the government’s refusal to open source "Travel with Peace" so that the public can verify whether the program has hidden functions.
Some IT organizations criticized the government and dragged down public perception.
More fundamentally, the political atmosphere has caused numerous policy obstacles such as the past amendments to the Copyright Ordinance and smart lamp posts. This time the resistance to "travel with peace of mind" is just another example.
The consequence is that cases are leaked, and a large amount of false information about vaccines floods the society.
The government announced earlier that it is necessary to travel with peace of mind to enter all restaurants in Hong Kong from December 9.
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The technology to track infected people involves privacy disputes, but as Yuan Guoyong said, if the technology is not good and the patients cannot be isolated as soon as possible, the community outbreak will be serious. I believe everyone also hopes that the prosperous Christmas market can continue, and hospitals need not be busy coping with it. New crown patients.
Therefore, for public health, citizens must lay aside their privacy and allow the government to collect enough information for the government through "travel with peace of mind" so that the government can apply it in time when tracking the transmission chain.
In addition to a rational view of the importance of tracking and preventing the epidemic, the government should also take the initiative to disclose more "Travel with peace of mind" and the related "Hong Kong Health Code" programming to convince the public that they did not use this to collect excessive data.
Furthermore, the government should regard the epidemic as an opportunity to repair the relationship between the government and the people. After the government and the people have defeated the epidemic together, it is believed that it can establish a consensus on other political issues concerning people's livelihood.
Epidemic prevention cannot be perfunctory, otherwise the whole Hong Kong will be affected by epidemic prevention first before easing the government's "year pass".
