State surveillance is on the rise globally as governments such as Egypt's take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic, warns exiled historian and intellectual Khaled Fahmy.
"How this will pan out, not only in Egypt but elsewhere ... in how governments will be able to monitor citizens' mobility and physical activities is very alarming," Fahmy told AFP in an online interview.
"If you compare what is happening in Egypt now and the cholera epidemic of 1947, one big difference is how open the media was back then and how closed it is (now) in how they cover the epidemic," Fahmy noted.
The softly-spoken historian places the larger coronavirus pandemic within a chronology of diseases that ravaged Egypt through the ages.
"Quarantines started being imposed in Egypt in a very strict way" after an 1831 cholera outbreak that spread from China to the Middle East, he said.
