ABSTRACT
COVID-19 is the first pandemic where we have leveraged technologies in wide use—such as cellphones and QR codes—to develop powerful digital tools to help in the fight against an infectious disease. This chapter seeks to begin a conversation about how we should think about using technological tools in the fight against future pandemic diseases. Analyses of the law and ethics of digital contact tracing and digital health certificates treat COVID-19 as a constant, but our chapter identifies three disease characteristics that policymakers will need to consider in evaluating the appropriateness of future disease-fighting technologies. These characteristics are (1) the severity of the illness the disease causes, (2) its level of infectiousness, and (3) its mode of transmission, which bears on the social stigma associated with contracting the disease.
