China: Electronic Tags To Be Placed On COVID Patients To Prevent Them From Leaving Home

Citizens in China with COVID-19 will be required to wear a bracelet that tracks their movements. It's part of an electronic style health code system and is, according to the government, a measure to curb the spread of the coronavirus by forcing people to remain in their homes and ensure they are quarantining.

If you've tested positive, you have to wear one. This isn't the first time such measures have been put in place. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Hong Kong used bracelets to track people under home quarantine. There were two of them, one was a plastic wristband with a QR code and the other had an electronic tracker built into it.

Citizens in China are part of a health code system that tracks their movements via mobile phones. They are only allowed to enter public spaces if the QR code is green. If it's yellow that means people have been in close contact with an infected person, and if it's red that means they have tested positive for the virus.

Human rights watchdogs have long criticised China’s health code system as an invasion of privacy, warning that Beijing uses data collected by the system to help control and restrict freedoms.

The irony of western media outlets writing about China's handling of the coronavirus, and other ways their government chooses to govern their citizens, isn't really much different from North American and some European governments. Much of the world witnessed this when mandatory lockdown measures were introduced, forcing people to close their business and stay at home for prolonged periods of time. Many people lost their jobs due to vaccine mandates, which are still in place in several different ways across the planet.

Despite all of the harms that these measures caused, both health and economy wise, these harms and basic COVID-19 facts were completely ignored by government health agencies and mainstream media networks. Instead, only one perspective dominated the narrative, capturing the consciousness of millions.

"Every city is different. Hong Kong is very different from Shanghai or Macau, in terms of the total population, in terms of the age distribution, and also in terms of the vaccination as well as the fact that Hong Kong has already had the fifth wave which has caused widespread infections. We've paid the price," Lo Chung Mau, the health minister for Hong Kong, said.

What's even more concerning is the fact that an International Pandemic Treaty is in the works, which means the world has probably not seen the last of the measures that were implemented throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Will they come back when the next 'pandemic' hits?

We have strayed far from a true democracy, and live in an age where the majority of people on the planet, or at least a large percentage of them, completely disagree and condemn how governments and organizations, like the WHO, have handled the pandemic. This is also true for several other global issues that seem to be, in many cases, perpetuated by those whom we look to for solutions to these issues.

It's great to see more people become aware of the corruption that plagues geopolitics; this in itself is resulting in a massive push for a better world. Continuously asking big government and relying on the system in place for change is clearly not the answer anymore.