Dr Karel Caals1
1NUS Centre For Biomedical Ethics
Drawing on prior experience with the SARS outbreak, East Asian societies like China, Hong Kong and Singapore quickly introduced social distancing measures, including lockdowns. India, however, was not seriously impacted by SARS. Without the benefit of prior experience and with their health system already burdened by a number of systemic and social challenges, India has had less policy measures and infection control tools at its disposal in dealing with the pandemic, at least in the short term. Generally, contact tracing applications in China and India collect more data, which can be downloaded remotely, than those in Hong Kong and Singapore, which are not connected to the internet.
Our research consists of a comparative analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic has mainstreamed digital technologies in public health surveillance in India, China, Hong Kong SAR, and Singapore. Digital tools that are used to monitor health conditions were previously only applied in limited and controlled settings, like health-related research. With rapid digitalization, the centre-staging of challenges with (public) health systems and data integration, data governance (including concerns about privacy and cybersecurity), and raising data literacy across all levels of society may well be one of the lasting legacies of this pandemic. It could also aggravate the digital divide among countries, and is thereby also a significant concern in global health ethics. In this presentation, I present findings from the study, as well as ethical and legal changes that should be considered.
Biography:
Currently a Research Fellow at the NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE), Karel obtained a PhD in Health Geography, after qualitative field research on the training of healthcare professionals in Timor-Leste to establish the concept of the More-than-National Health System. As part of his interest in health systems, he researches the digitalisation of health, working on topics such as the ethics of artificial intelligence in healthcare and digital health surveillance. Additional interests include various topics in the field of research ethics. As Assistant Editor, he manages and promotes the Asian Bioethics Review, an academic journal established and hosted by CBmE, and published by Springer Nature.