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<nettime> The Health Code's 'Long March'


The Health Code’s ‘Long March’

Written by Yun Xi, edited by ‘Ferocious Bro’

Published on the Hangzhou Engineer Crew official account, April 3.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/AVYGDAkr-vYNNo5K7srdcQ

On Feb. 3, after Hangzhou had implemented strict quarantine measures
as one of the first areas in Zhejiang province hit by the epidemic,
the city’s Yuhang district organized Ali Cloud, DingTalk, and Alipay
to form a virtual online team to urgently develop the earlier version
of Health Code.

On Feb. 6, Hangzhou Municipal Party Secretary Zhou Jiangyong made
a proposal at an important meeting: in order to help enterprises
to resume work, the city should play to advantages of its digital
economy. He proposed to establish a unified digital declaration
platform, including personal electronic health codes and timely data
sharing.


The Party Secretary wanted to roll out the code the next day.

Relevant departments in Hangzhou as well as within Alibaba worked
overtime overnight to finalize the business logic map.

After a sleepless day of development, on Feb. 8, the enterprise
employee health code was launched. The development team soon became
the Hangzhou health code project team, and more government departments
and technical personnel were transferred to the site.

In the early morning of Feb. 7, Yuhang District’s system, known
as “Yuhang Green Code,” was officially launched. 269,000 people
entered their information within 24 hours.

On Feb. 13, Ali Cloud senior technical expert Li Haolong wrote a
pledge to get a Zhejiang health code online within 48 hours.


On Feb. 20, Li Kai, head of Ali Cloud digital government in Hubei
province, received a list of developers who were stranded in
Hubei—more than 150 people.

He used half a day to set up a virtual online group of more than 70
people, their task: in three days, to create a health code system for
Hubei.

By then, the number of confirmed cases in Hubei had exceeded 60,000.
Unlike other provinces and cities, which primarily use red codes to
find out who to isolate, in Hubei the idea was to figure out who could
go outside.

The epidemic situation in Hubei province is changing from moment to
moment, so the government kept changing the requirements for the
algorithm. Therefore, an entirely different algorithm from Zhejiang
had to be developed.

Hubei was already divided into high, medium, and low risk areas.
Within 4 hours, the team had an algorithm for the low-risk areas;
within 12, for medium. For high-risk areas, they didn’t develop a
general algorithm, instead focusing on covering essential workers by
building a white list. People with unexplained fevers were placed on
red code if they were in Wuhan; in the rest of Hubei, they got no code
at all for the time being.

These problems were just the tip of the iceberg.

The team started with only four people, and the complexity and
accuracy of the algorithm increased exponentially, Li said.

There is no doubt that close contacts such as confirmed cases and
their spouses had to be issued red codes.

“The most complicated are the atypical situations, such as driving
through Hubei but sleeping in your car, or taking a bullet train
through Hubei…” Ali cloud data intelligence team product expert,
code engine product manager Ding Xianshu said.

“The most complicated cases to evaluate are the atypical one, such
as driving through Hubei without a stop on the road, or sleeping on
the road for one night, or taking abullet train through hubei, and
further subdivision. Or if there’s are suspected confirmed cases in
an apartment complex, do you have to put everyone in the complex on
a red code?” asked Ding Xianshu, Ali cloud data intelligence team
product expert and code engine product manager.

The code must also adapt to changes as rules are updated every day,
changing how people visited and underwent temperature checks in public
places, pharmacies, supermarkets, intersections.

At one point, project leader Li did not sleep for 48 hours. The calls
kept pouring in and his lungs were clogged.

Everyone told Li to rest, but he refused. Someone complained to HR,
and several colleagues forced him back into the car and sent him home.

Arriving home early in the morning, Li recalled, the security guards,
having learned that he was developing the app, immediately stood and
gave him a salute.

On the day of the launch of Zhejiang’s health code, the electronic
government office of the general office of the state council
instructed Ali to accelerate the development of a national integrated
health code system.

Two days later, CCTV news featured the Zhejiang health code.

All the provinces soon wanted their own version.

So, on Feb. 18, Ali Cloud’s data intelligence team stood up four
teams to bring the code nationwide. Hubei’s algorithm rules were the
most complex.

“That green code, that green color—for a long time, it was
hope.” Li said.

The road from Hangzhou Yuchang Green Code’s Feb. 7 launch to YiChang
Prefecture, Hubei’s first green code on March 6, was just one month.

The long march that China’s tech giants have been trying to
accomplish for nearly two decades —one platform covering Beijing,
Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, or a remote frontier or
mountainous region—took just one month.

For thousands of years, humans and information have been two separate
things. The invention of language, writing, printing, the telegraph,
and the Internet made it easier for people to find information. After
entering the era of mobile Internet, the smart phone has turned into
humanity’s information organ.

But getting this mass of information out efficiently and accurately
amounts to a revolution, and cloud computing is what underpins it.

In March 1953, the world had only 53k bytes of high-speed memory
(RAM). Today, smartphones have 100,000 times that amount. People and
information are already one. The essence of health code is to reshape
the relationship between people and information, and to promote the
emergence of strong information people.

But the creators of health codes don’t feel like heroes.

“What are we compared to the health care workers who are on the
front lines of the virus and life and death?” Li said, “I only
hate that I can’t go to Wuhan to participate in the construction of
the temporary hospital.”

Translation via
https://technode.com/2020/04/07/china-voices-how-alibaba-built-chinas-health-code/




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