BY ELIAS MARAT
As an increasing amount of cities and states across the world clamp down on citizen movement due to the coronavirus, officials have been deploying drones in a bid to scare some sense into social distancing scofflaws.
The trend has seen dozens of law enforcement agencies and municipalities flock to one drone manufacturer based in China to help enforce quarantine rules while cutting costs on traditional public safety services.
One of the latest cities to enlist drones into its arsenal is Daytona Beach, Florida, which now has eight of the flying tools, including two loaned by Shenzhen, China-based drone manufacturer DJI Technology.
Over the past week, the Daytona Beach Police Department has flown upwards of 30 missions to enforce the statewide stay-at-home order in the city's beachfront parks and on hiking trails.
For police management, the use of drones is a common-sense solution to the problem of dissuading law-breakers while maintaining a safe distance amid the ongoing pandemic.
Sgt. Tim Ehrenkaufer, the head of DBPD's Unmanned Aviation Systems Unit, told WKMG:
We're reducing the officer having to go out there, walk into the park property, walking into a crowd of people, share those germs back and forth just to deliver a message that, 'The park's closed. Don't be in here.'
The drone also has a FLIR thermal camera that can read people's body temperatures, allowing police to single out those potentially infected by CoViD-19--a tool that Ehrenkaufer says will help officers know from a glance what precautions should be taken.
On Monday, former FDA chief Scott Gottlieb told CNBC that the US must build a "massive surveillance system" to detect where the virus might be spreading next - and maybe one of the best ways to monitor large swaths of the population could be through the use of pandemic drones across major US metropolitan cities.
The COVID-19 outbreak is proving to be the Trojan horse that justifies the ushering in of the surveillance state. We've noted how governments and corporations are quickly deploying big data and spy tools to monitor people during the pandemic.
The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, and now the war on COVID-19: all start out as legitimate responses but then are used by politicians to increase the surveillance state and erode any freedoms citizens have left
What's coming to America in the not-too-distant future is a full-blown surveillance state, that could be on par with China's.
In particular, we want to show readers what could be coming down the pipe: That is, "pandemic drones" outfitted with specialized sensor and computer vision system that can fly around cities and detect if people have elevated body temperatures, respiratory rates, as well as to identify if people are sneezing and coughing (all signs of a COVID-19 carrier)
A US-based drone company called Draganfly is spearheading the effort to build a drone network across public areas to detect infected people. The drone network is called the "global early warning system" that would be able to spot the first signs of a pandemic.
Draganfly was recently selected by Vital Intelligence, a healthcare data services and deep learning company in conjunction with the University of South Australia, to "immediately commercialize" pandemic drones to monitor people in public areas.
"Draganfly is honored to work on such an important project given the current pandemic facing the world with COVID-19. Health and respiratory monitoring will be vital for not only detection, but also utilizing the data to understand health trends.
As we move forward, drones and autonomous technology doing detection will be an important part of ensuring public safety," said Andy Card, Director of Draganfly and former Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff.
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