China suppressed Covid-19 with AI and big data

China used locational and other data from hundreds of millions of smartphones to contain the spread of COVID-19, according to Chinese sources familiar with the program. In addition to draconian quarantine procedures, which kept more than 150 million Chinese in place at the February peak of the coronavirus epidemic, China used sophisticated computational methods on a scale never attempted in the West. With more than 80,000 cases registered, China reported only 126 new cases yesterday, compared to 851 in South Korea and 835 in Iran, out of a total of 1,969 new cases worldwide. Chinese sources emphasize that the artificial intelligence initiative supplemented basic public health measures, which centered on quarantines and aggressive efforts to convince Chinese citizens to change their behavior. Chinese government algorithms can estimate the probability that a given neighborhood or even an individual has exposure to COVID-19 by matching the location of smartphones to known locations of infected individuals or groups.