COVID-19 Is Flourishing in a Tech-Savvy Society. Here is How to Prevent History from Repeating.

Twenty years after a virus outbreak decimates 99 percent of the world’s population, a symphonic band traveling around Michigan, or what is left of it, spreads their mantra of Survival is Insufficient conveniently painted on the side of their caravan. While this is a fictional scene from the novel Station Eleven, this mantra rings true today. Insufficiency is the same reason why students like me pursue a college education and why society has succeeded to eradicate the deadliest of viruses through vaccines, just to name a few examples. However, we are failing to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 because we have become complacent in applying medicinal advances from previous generations.

My generation, Generation Z, is the first generation to grow up with technological advances like computers and the internet. When it comes to pandemics though, we have not taken full advantage of the intersection of medicine, technology, and historical knowledge today. The Roman Empire experienced the Antonine Plague and the Plague of Justinian. They were set on quarantining the sick from the healthy, since they understood the illness spread from human to human but did not understand the science behind it. Even with these mitigation measures in place, the Roman Empire fell because they failed to understand how external factors like disease, climate change, and war intersected. Similarly, smallpox ravaged a more interconnected world in the 1700s. This disease forced the advancement of medicine and the creation of inoculation. Inoculation consists of inserting living organisms, like smallpox, into an incision in a healthy person’s skin to provide the individual with a mild case of the illness with the benefits of lower fatality rates and lifelong immunity. While these efforts stopped the severe impacts of previous illnesses like in the Roman Empire, it did not stop the virus from spreading worldwide.

In the 1960s, the World Health Organization set out to eliminate the smallpox virus using contact tracing, quarantining, and their recent medical advancement: vaccines. In 1980, at the World Health Assembly, the smallpox virus was considered eradicated. Although they were successful, mitigation took nearly two hundred years. Fast forward to 2020 and we are still using the same mitigation techniques to combat COVID-19 despite the invention of the internet. Pre-COVID-19, Google began a partnership with Ascension, making it possible to use the big data from all the hospitals’ patient records and plug it into an artificial intelligence which automatically generated diagnoses and recommendations to patients. However, concerns remained from patients about how vulnerable Google’s servers were from outside attacks and which internal employees had access to their personal data.

Now, despite protests at numerous state capitols over the use of emergency powers infringing on individual rights, Apple and Google have quietly teamed up to prototype opt-in contact tracing on cellphones like the apps being used in Singapore and China. In fact, Ford assembly line workers in the US must wear Bluetooth-enabled watches that vibrate when they breach another worker’s six-foot social distancing guideline from the CDC. As a computer science major, I recognize that there are substantial tradeoffs to using individuals’ geographic location data during times of crisis, such as this pandemic. Similar difficult conversations are being had in every state on the economic and health tradeoffs of opening back up. On one hand, citizens want to go back to work to pay rent or feed their families, or just satisfy cravings for social freedoms like sporting events and movie theatre showings. On the other hand, congregating in tight, enclosed spaces causes detrimental health effects by increasing rates of transmission leading to higher fatality rates.

At times of crisis, we need to be more willing to forgo our traditional definition of civil liberties and adopt a more contemporary definition. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, opting into voluntary location-based monitoring would negatively affect collective rights through privacy infringements. However, during times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, opting into location-based monitoring for the purpose of contact tracing temporarily reduces privacy rights with the superior effect of increased collective health. Civil liberties were intended to benefit all in all situations, but in this specific situation, our moral responsibility to help others outweighs our right to privacy.

Waiting for a vaccine to be developed, tested, and approved for widespread use over a year from now is insufficient. Advances like smartphone contact tracing through the intersection of medicine, technology, and history must be seized now to shorten the pandemic timeline and prevent history from being repeated.