Has Blockchain Helped China with Coronavirus Epidemic Prevention?

6 min readFeb 26, 2020

The corona virus outbreak in China has raised an epidemic prevention war, not only in the regions of China, but also in other countries as the virus began to spread globally. This large epidemic outbreak is beginning to expose various social problems and loopholes in the urban epidemic prevention and control.

After the outbreak, China is faced with many problems in containing the spread of the corona virus and keeping control. The problems included tracing the source of the virus, tracing the transmission path, isolating the contact with the crowd, monitoring and controlling the movement of social personnel, the distribution of medical resources, charitable donations, and raising the supplies of medical resources. Most of these problems are focused on data monitoring, traceability and trusted mechanisms, and their characteristics seem to be completely solvable with blockchain technology, so why is the technology absent in this epidemic fight?

The truth is, the blockchain technology is not absent in this epidemic fight, it’s just that the blockchain applications are still being developed. The corona virus outbreak was sudden and spread too fast, it took just a little more than a month to reach 70,000 confirmed infection cases in China. For the technology, from the initial demand to the formation of effective solutions and then the implementation of the solutions with a technical framework, it requires a process and time. Most technical response programs are still in the emergency development stage and have not yet been put into use. Therefore, during the epidemic prevention, we can’t see any blockchain technology on the front line, but they are in fact all on their way.

Here are what the blockchain technology can do in the fight for epidemic prevention. For the prevention and control of outbreaks in cities, blockchain technology can be applied to population movement and health data monitoring. For example, a health monitoring station is uniformly set up at a city’s stations, airports, transportation hubs, community gates, hospitals, and other personnel entrances, and the real-time health monitoring data is chained, and all data information is stored on the blockchain ledger to ensure all data is authentic, credible, open and searchable. Once a problem occurs in a link, it can be quickly traced back to the source of the problem from the data on the blockchain, and the information and data links associated with it can be distinguished for processing, and the relevant persons can be arranged for isolation quickly. Similarly, the application of blockchain technology to resource regulation and ledger disclosure is also very helpful. During the epidemic prevention campaign, the Wuhan Red Cross caused a lot of problems because of its opaque operating system and chaotic resource deployment mechanism, which delayed the progress of epidemic prevention and disaster relief. However, if blockchain technology is applied to the operation of charities, these problems will no longer occur. By putting the data of donations and funds, as well as the resource allocation data of the charity organization into a detailed ledger, this can allow the public to know clearly how much funds the organization has, how much resources it has, where the resources and funds are stored, where each expenditure and resource is allocated to, and what effects has been achieved. In terms of resource allocation control, the patient admission data, medical resource consumption data, and resource stock in a city’s hospitals can be put on the chain to monitor the city’s epidemic intensity and resource supply. The public and the government can use these public and credible data to clearly understand which materials are needed for the city’s epidemic prevention, and what the prices are, so that the society can better cooperate with the government to carry out epidemic prevention and resource supply assistance. At the same time, medical institutions can get better logistical protection, charities can make the use of funds more transparent, and the medical resources can be used most effectively. There are several blockchain projects developing such platform, to make sure the chaos caused by the Wuhan Red Cross never happens again and ensuring the hospitals and patients getting the resources that they desperately need.

To effectively control the spread of the corona virus within city crowds, a system for population contact data is being developed. The system combines the data from devices that have data information sensor chips with data chips that contain user identity information, and putting them onto the chain. When the different setts of chips come into contact within a certain distance, the system will mutually establish a contact relationship, and upload this information to the blockchain ledger to record the contact relationship of a city. For each patient that is diagnosed with corona virus, the system will immediately contact and warn people within several levels of the relationship to achieve effective epidemic prevention and control. Another blockchain project is developing a new corona virus screening system, utilizing the data of previous patients with positive screening outcome of corona virus. the system will immensely speed up the diagnosis of virus infection, reduce human contact level, and reducing the overall cost of hospitals.

It can be said that the blockchain technology in this epidemic prevention war may be late for objective reasons, but it was never absent. In the coming months, you will see many blockchain technologies beginning to be applied to the epidemic prevention, and making great contributions to the epidemic’s spread control, prevention and elimination, not only in China, but in all the countries that are affected by the corona virus.

CyberVein is also keen to be involved in this fight for epidemic prevention, offering some of our strengths that can help protecting the people. CyberVein’s immutable database is built with improvements on the DAG technology, and the ledger is fractally built as a network of independent yet interconnected Smart Contracts. The database allows large sums of structured data to be stored and processed by many participants in parallel. The database can prove to be very useful in this epidemic prevention, as each hospital can store patient data, diagnosis data and resource and supply data, sharing such data with other institutions to provide a overall picture of the situation. The research institutions can obtained the shared data to build a model for corona virus screening, increasing the speed of research and development, and the effectiveness of the screening technology. If the patients or hospitals do not wish to share sensitive data with others, CyberVein can help by using the federated learning technology, where model construction algorithms can be circulated around each node to improve the overall model with the local data available at each node. The final model can then be distributed to the participant to provide effective solutions, without having compromised any data privacy.

There is a lot that the blockchain technology can do, especially when combined with other tools such as AI, IoT and Big Data. The epidemic outbreak in China has urged several parties to hasten the development of blockchain technology, and when the fight for epidemic prevention and elimination is over, this will surely become a big part of the momentum for blockchain application development. The blockchain technology will not be a one-time event that happens only in the current epidemic situation, but a lasting change that will continue to exist in the future.

Has Blockchain Helped China with Coronavirus Epidemic Prevention?

Written by CyberVein

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