China is easing its lockdown by using an app linked to WeChat and Alipay with green, yellow, red colour coding that changes with your health status. Right now those with green status in Wuhan can travel. However, if a new infection is found, the person turns red and everyone who came in close contact with that person turns yellow and goes into automatic 14 day quarantine.

Hong Kong is using digital wristbands, download GPS tracked ‘StayHomeSafe’ app and citizens scan their unique QR codes wherever they go. Breaking quarantine faces up to six months in prison.

South Korea are tracking citizens through a combination of GPS, CCTV and credit card transactions to track people, leading to a realtime map and citizen tracker.

Singapore rolled out a ‘TraceTogether’ app, using Bluetooth to track who you came in close contact with. Those at risk when a new case was found would immediately be notified. More than a million citizens downloaded it voluntarily in the first week of launch. Singapore has now made the app open source for other cities and countries to use.

Would you use it?

These Asian countries are ahead of the West in gradually easing their lockdowns as they are using digital tracking to laser focus on who has COVID-19, who is at risk, and who is OK.

The reason the same hasn’t happened in the West isn’t because of technology or safety. It’s because of ideology. In democratic countries where the freedom of the individual comes first, the idea of being digitally tracked is anathema. But without individual tracking, there’s no way to ease restrictions without the virus growing out of control again.

As a result, our freedom becomes our prison.

Will the West rather stay in a no-mans land of stop-start of lockdown easing-tightening? Or will it start moving towards some form of digital tracking?

Last Friday Apple and Google announced they are building a bluetooth-based coronavirus tracking API’s enabling apps similar to Singapore’s ‘TraceTogether’ app into iOS and Android. But these still need countries and cities to convince their citizens to use such an app.

Last week France’s Interior Minister, Christophe Castaner said “Tracking is one of the solutions that have been adopted by a number of countries, so we have decided to work with them in looking at these options. I am convinced that if these apps allow us to fight the virus and if they do not infringe on individual liberties, tracking is a tool that will be accepted by the French people.”

Yesterday the UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, said an NHS app similar to Singapore’s system was being launched. But it needed 60% of British adults to use it for it to be effective.

If countries are too slow to move, it could be that cities take charge. In Brazil, a local startup InLoco has created a geolocation app to track the virus which is 30 times more accurate than GPS. While the national government mulls a national system, the Mayor of Recife (where InLoco is based) has already started using the system with 700,000 residents. After the announcement, InLoco has been flooded with requests from other Brazilian cities for the system.

If a city in your country opened up with voluntary tracking, while others remained closed or experiencing a second wave without tracking, would you consider moving to the city?

Or if your city or country enforced tracking the way they have in the East, would you move out?

As the more progressive cities and their citizens adopt a digital tracking strategy to reopen successfully, it could be that those holding on to their ideology will be the ones left behind. They will either remain in lockdown or suffer a second wave and repeated lockdowns, with the ironic consequence that they will have to pay the real economic cost for the illusion of freedom.

Could it be that the countries that restart first without a second wave and get to travel, connect, breathe fresh air and live life fully are not East vs West, or Developed vs Developing, or Democratic vs Authoritarian, but tracked vs not tracked?

If so, those who most value their freedom will be the ones who will remain without it.