Fighting Pandemics with Physical Distancing Management Technologies

As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in everyday lives, the need to limit the spread of the virus remains a challenge, even with advances in medical knowledge, patient care, and vaccine development and distribution. Furthermore, COVID-19 is one in a recent series of airborne diseases, and probably not the last, given the ongoing encroachment of humans into animal habitat. This paper addresses the challenge of managing physical distancing, a highly effective, yet unnatural and contentious, mitigation strategy against infectious diseases. It presents a Pandemic Tech Stack and proposes that physical distancing management technologies are underutilized to fight pandemics. The latter can help ensure that people remain apart when they need to, support the transfer of activities to an online format, and, ultimately, facilitate the gradual reopening of our economies. The challenges associated with the development and use of these technologies are identified and discussed from both the technical and socio-psychological perspectives.