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Top1. Introduction
COVID-19, the infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus, has shaken the world. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is a virus of a “perfect storm,” because it has shown to be capable of spreading from animals to humans (e.g., bats to humans) and vice versa (e.g., humans to minks) (Munnick et al. 2020). Officially characterized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020 (WHO 2020), the disease remains rampant, taking away more and more lives while deepening social and economic hardships. Coronaviruses, present in bats and other animals, are capable of making new versions of themselves while trying to infect new hosts, including humans (Haseltine, 2020; Munnink et al. 2020; O’Leary, 2020).
The rapid spread of COVID-19 cases, and associated deaths, have triggered global containment and mitigation measures (e.g., government mandated shut-downs), as well as the large-scale adoption of infection prevention practices in efforts to “flatten the curve” (Anderson et al. 2020; OECD 2020a). Governments committed billions of dollars to medical research in a frantic effort to develop, produce, and deliver vaccines. The potential benefits from these efforts are now being reported, as the wide-spread distribution of vaccinations becomes a reality. However, the virus has continued to mutate into genetic variants (Lauring and Hodcroft 2021), so considerable time might elapse before effective, durable herd immunity is realized (Edridge et al., 2020; Randolph and Barreiro 2020).
Even more troubling is the fact that COVID-19 is one in a recent series of airborne diseases. It is probably not the last one, given the ongoing encroachment of humans into animal habitat (Plowright et al. 2017). In fact, just two years prior to the onset of COVID-19, the scientific journal Nature Reviews Microbiology published an article with this ominous question: “Are we prepared against the next influenza pandemic?” (Medina 2018). The article observed the increase in the number of viruses that jumped from animals to humans, asserting that a major pandemic was a real possibility. Scientists estimate that approximately 1200 viruses have the potential to create other pandemics (Baumgartner and Rainey 2020; O’Leary, 2020).
It is, thus, very likely that the infection prevention practices that have become part of our daily habits during the COVID-19 crisis (e.g., mask-wearing, tele working, hand hygiene, physical distancing) are likely to remain relevant. This is especially so as health and socio-economic systems transition to a “new normal” and become better prepared for future pandemics (Kasai 2020). Among the above-mentioned practices, physical distancing is currently the best available mechanism to slow the pace of disease transmission within communities and is especially important for highly contagious and deadly viruses such as COVID-19 (Chu et al. 2020). Physical distancing measures have been defined and executed heterogeneously across countries, but, in essence, they all aim at reducing the frequency of physical contacts and the contact distances between people during an infectious disease outbreak (Kelso et al. 2009). Physical distancing could appear to have all desirable attributes of a pandemic management tool: theoretically effective, easy and inexpensive to deploy. However, in practice, it has proven fallible and contentious (Baum et al. 2020; Jonaitis 2020; Marlow and Hong 2020). Furthermore, arguably no digital technology has managed to successfully address this critical issue yet.