© China Daily via ReutersPeople in rural China are being publicly shamed by talking drones for not wearing face masks or for venturing outside unnecessarily.
Travel restrictions have been placed on residents in Taizhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo and Wenzhou; allowing only one person per household to leave every two days to go and pick up supplies. In addition, residents in Taizhou must present ID every time they leave their homes.
City authorities also have placed rent controls on landlords, expressly forbidding them from renting their properties to people from "severely affected areas such as Hubei," if they have traveled home in the past few months.
The city of Hangzhou, just 110 miles (177km) from major population center and business hub Shanghai, which boasts over 24 million people, already has 200 confirmed cases of coronavirus. The wearing of face masks in public is mandatory and temperature checks are commonplace for those who venture outside.
Similar measures were announced on Sunday for the city of Wenzhou, which severely restricted movement for its nine million residents in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus.
In China alone, at least 427 deaths and over 20,000 cases of coronavirus infection have been confirmed. The majority of the deaths have been concentrated in Wuhan in Hubei Province, where the outbreak began in December 2019. The city has been on lockdown for almost two weeks.
China's leadership acknowledged "shortcomings and difficulties exposed in the response to the epidemic" in a statement on Monday.
"It is necessary to strengthen market supervision, resolutely ban and severely crack down on illegal wildlife markets and trade," the Politburo Standing Committee said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Comment: There is good, there is evil, and there is the situation that determines whether an action is one or the other. Public surveillance is bad, but when a health crisis takes hold in a country with such a large population, it may be the most efficient way to spread a message and encourage helpful behaviour to mitigate the crisis. Bad is when, having normalized the idea of open drone surveillance, the Chinese government continues to use it after the need for it passes. Unfortunately, this is likely how it will play out.