“When we reopened, we were very tentative about letting people back into the office….You have to show your health code, which is attached to the Alipay app. It'll show a green, yellow, or red code; basically it reflects a lot of data—where you've been, who you've been with.”

If you’ve never heard of Alibaba, chances are you aren’t one of the 700 million active annual consumers living in China who rely on the company for e-commerce, online auctions, technology and business services, entertainment, and even grocery shopping. Keeping Alibaba’s 100,000 employees healthy is a priority for co-founder Joe Tsai, and he’s wary of going too fast, too soon.

“China doesn't publish testing data, but our estimate is that there are at least 20-25 million tests that have already been done….If you open up and you cannot detect, trace, and isolate infected patients, then it's going to be a disaster.”