(Author: Zhang Nandiyang, Deputy Director of the Qingdao Branch of the National Academy of Development and Strategy at Renmin University of China; Associate Professor, School of Public Administration)
The Wuhan Red Cross Society has recently faced significant public criticism online.
Many are asking: if the Red Cross has received massive donations, why are medical supplies still in short supply? Is the total volume of donations insufficient, or is the distribution system inefficient? While reports indicate that九州通 (JiuZhouTong) has stepped in to help the Wuhan Red Cross manage supplies, improving distribution logistics, key questions remain unanswered. The total amount of donations, the quantity that meets required standards, and—even with improved logistics—how effectively supplies are reaching frontline hospitals are all still unclear.
I. Beyond the Information Chaos: The Need for Complete, Authentic, and Trustworthy Data
To grasp the full picture of any situation, people need information that is complete, authentic, and trustworthy. Yet the raw, unfiltered state of mass information often fails to meet this need—it tends to be fragmented and of inconsistent reliability, making it difficult to piece together an accurate understanding of events.
"Fragmentation" means that data and information come from countless disparate sources without any organic integration. Each source contributes to the information ocean in its own format and style—a natural feature of our digital age. However, when someone seeks a holistic or even a reasonably complete view of an event, this raw, scattered information is of little direct use.
The greater danger is that people don't stop needing information just because it's fragmented. During a crisis, public anxiety intensifies the craving for reliable facts and accelerates attempts to synthesize disparate data points. Lacking sophisticated tools, individuals often resort to the most basic method: manually assembling the fragments themselves.
This is exactly what we witnessed during the pandemic: a proliferation of rumors. To make sense of the situation, people stitched together scattered public opinions, unverified claims, and official statements. Gaps in the narrative were inevitably filled with speculation. When even speculation couldn't bridge logical holes, those voids became fertile ground for panic and misinformation.
"Credibility" refers to the level of trust users place in information. Even information that appears comprehensive is useless—or worse, actively misleading—if it is incomplete or unverified. Public skepticism toward the Red Cross illustrates this perfectly. While a centralized body like the Red Cross should theoretically be more efficient than scattered grassroots efforts, its logistical advantages evaporate once trust is lost. As a result, even logically sound explanations from the Red Cross about the overall supply situation face a severe credibility deficit.
During a crisis, beyond completeness and trustworthiness, people also need information in real time. Situations evolve rapidly; static or delayed data cannot support a dynamic understanding of the crisis, inform government decisions, or enable effective public awareness and oversight.
An effective pandemic response requires not just data from multiple departments, but end-to-end visibility into entire processes—with real-time updates. Crucially, this information must be openly accessible to society, ensuring completeness, timeliness, and full transparency.
Returning to our initial question—"Why are Wuhan hospitals still short of supplies despite massive donations?"—the answer could be found with a simple calculation. What is the total demand across all hospitals in Wuhan? What is the total volume of donations received nationwide? How much of that meets the required standards? Comparing these figures would instantly show whether supply falls short of demand. If total supply exceeds demand yet hospitals report shortages, the problem clearly lies in distribution. But performing this basic analysis requires access to the underlying data.
II. Blockchain in Pandemic Response: A Use Case for Donation Management
Within the traditional technology toolkit, no single solution fully meets our requirements for data integrity and accessibility. For a long time, the goal of deep integration, openness, real-time access, and sharing remained largely theoretical—until blockchain technology entered the realm of public administration.
As a relatively new technology, blockchain has only existed globally for about 11 years. On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the seminal whitepaper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," introducing the concept of using blockchain to enable direct, intermediary-free digital transactions.
Blockchain technology supports diverse applications, each requiring specific implementations and architectures. Its adoption in public administration is recent but growing—for example, in securing health insurance data, improving internal government systems, and enabling faster approvals and smarter governance in public service delivery.
Underpinning all these applications are blockchain's core strengths: shared access, transparency, traceability, immutability, and decentralization.
First, Solving Fragmentation: Holistic Data Integration. Blockchain enables effective end-to-end, cross-departmental data integration, providing a complete view and ensuring full traceability.
Take donation logistics as an example. "End-to-end" refers to the entire journey of donated goods—from donor to final beneficiary—including logistics, warehousing, sorting, and delivery. Currently, these stages operate in silos. On a blockchain, information about donated items is recorded the moment they enter the logistics system. Their movement from sender to recipient is tracked much like a standard package. Entries can be highly detailed, capturing the item's name, weight, sender, recipient, addresses, model numbers, quantities, and more.
However, logistics companies typically only track goods between the original sender and the initial recipient. During a public health crisis, the initial recipient (like a charity or NGO) may not be the final beneficiary. In this pandemic, for instance, the Red Cross publicly accepted donations for redistribution. So, even after goods reach the Red Cross, their journey isn't over.
With blockchain, if the initial recipient is an intermediary, the item's information continues to be recorded after logistics handoff. Details like exact inventory specs, arrival times, retrieval times, the retrieving entity, and subsequent dispatch to beneficiaries are all logged.
Thanks to blockchain, no matter how many intermediaries are involved, every step is captured. This effectively eliminates information gaps at handoff points. At any moment, stakeholders can see exactly where donated goods are, whether distribution is on schedule, and precisely where bottlenecks occur—removing opacity from every stage.
"Cross-departmental" refers to all entities involved—logistics firms, government agencies, charities, and delivery channels. Integrating data across departments is both critical and notoriously difficult. Without unified integration, a holistic view of resource allocation is impossible. Logistics handles transport; governments and charities manage distribution; delivery channels ensure final handover. Importantly, these aren't single entities but numerous, geographically dispersed actors: multiple logistics companies, several government departments, potentially dozens of NGOs, and layered delivery networks. Blockchain allows simultaneous data uploads from all these sectors, achieving true panoramic integration.
Second, Data Credibility, Full Traceability, and Immutability. Regarding credibility, blockchain establishes trust through multi-party participation. Distributed storage ensures ledger data exists across multiple nodes, preventing systemic failure or tampering via a single point of compromise. Within each block's data structure, any modification breaks the cryptographic hash linking it to adjacent blocks. Furthermore, every deletion generates a new record. Thus, all activities—reading, writing, deleting, retrieving—leave an immutable, auditable trail, making emergency supply chain data truly tamper-proof.
Third, Transparent Identities, Data Visibility, and Public Access. All institutions and departments involved in donation and distribution have transparent, on-chain identities. All related operational data—donation receipts, allocation decisions, distribution records—are immutably logged, creating a permanent, auditable trail. From the moment data is recorded, it becomes publicly visible, tamper-proof, and redundantly stored across the network.
Because institutional identities are transparent on-chain, accountability is clear: whose data, whose responsibility. This dramatically raises the cost of dishonesty for any department. If data integrity is compromised at the source, the misconduct is self-evident and traceable back to its origin. Such transparency incentivizes departments to maintain integrity voluntarily.
Logistics tracking, aggregate volumes, allocation status, and distribution details are all recorded and publicly disclosed, beyond the manipulation of any single entity. Therefore, under a blockchain system, any broken link in the supply chain becomes immediately visible to the entire network.
Most importantly, blockchain enables public access to the donation supply chain. "Openness" means anyone with user credentials can query on-chain data at any time, truly placing information "in the sunlight" for universal public scrutiny and oversight.
III. Blockchain + Public Health Crisis Management: A Conceptual Technical Framework
Blockchains are generally categorized into public, private, and consortium chains. Public chains are defined by their openness and anonymity—anyone can join as a node and read or write data. Bitcoin, for example, runs on a public chain. However, public chains have drawbacks: they rely on energy-intensive computational competition to validate blocks, which is inefficient. The anonymity of nodes, while a feature, becomes a liability in many public governance scenarios where transparency is required. Private chains, being completely closed, also fail to meet the openness demands of public governance.
Consortium chains, with their semi-open nature, are well-suited for public governance applications—including specific use cases in managing public health crises. This semi-openness is characterized by a limited number of nodes with known identities, and not every user has read and write permissions.
Consider the donation and distribution of relief supplies. Two blockchain-based architectural approaches are possible:
One option is to build a dedicated consortium chain, placing all involved institutions—donors, distributors, and overseers—on a single network with internal nodes. However, such a chain might have limited utility once the crisis passes.
Alternatively, separate chains could be established by institution type—logistics providers, government agencies, charities, and distribution channels—forming an interoperable cross-chain network. This model may improve coordination within each sector and allow each chain to be repurposed for other shared scenarios post-crisis. However, it requires investment in robust cross-chain data-sharing mechanisms. The optimal model deserves further discussion and testing.
Regarding permissions: in a single-chain setup, a government department could host the central node to streamline oversight. In a cross-chain network, each chain could designate its own central node within its organization. Participating institutions would have read and write access to record and view donation and distribution data. The public would have read-only access, ensuring full transparency and enabling public oversight without the ability to alter records. These rules can be enforced via smart contracts. This design harnesses blockchain's strengths while conserving resources and opening data to the public. Concerns about system overload from public queries can be mitigated through technical measures like dedicated access nodes or socialized entry points.
Similar applications already exist domestically. For instance, Chongqing's Yuzhong District uses blockchain to trace agricultural products from farm to table, ensuring transparency at every step. Applying blockchain to track donated supplies follows the same principle, though it must be adapted to the specific context.
IV. Other Potential Blockchain Applications in Epidemic Prevention and Control
Of course, supply donation and distribution is just one example. Blockchain has several other potential applications in epidemic response.
Take hospital bed management: each healthcare facility could have read/write access to update total beds, occupied beds, and available beds in real time as patients are admitted or discharged. Major hospitals could also publish real-time queue data on-chain. The public could then see not only bed availability but also live wait times, helping them make informed decisions and avoid overcrowding. Aggregating this data on a single platform improves information access, guides patients efficiently, reduces unnecessary movement of suspected cases, and allows governments to monitor the situation in real time.
Another example is supply consumption management. Frontline hospitals use vast quantities of supplies daily, and accurate tracking is crucial for forecasting demand. Recent reports from Wuhan highlight that hospitals often rely on rough estimates, underscoring outdated methods and insufficient data granularity. Using blockchain to manage supply consumption would allow comprehensive tracking of inflows and outflows, capturing usage patterns across the board. If all regional hospitals joined a consortium chain, decision-makers would have precise, real-time visibility into supply dynamics, enabling better allocation of scarce resources.
Some may worry that building a nationwide healthcare resource network during a pandemic would divert critical manpower to data entry and maintenance. In practice, blockchain systems can integrate with existing workflows, allowing data to be recorded on-chain as part of routine operations.
In facing this pandemic, we all hope for a swift resolution with minimal loss. Current challenges—outdated data collection, delayed updates, and inefficient distribution—highlight the urgent need for better technological tools in governance. Of course, every technology has its limits: it should neither be dismissed nor overhyped. Technological upgrades cannot replace deeper structural reforms. Only by thoughtfully applying technology can we unlock its full potential.