INTRODUCTION

Contact tracing. QR codes. Bluetooth digital proximity tracing. Fastforward five years, and our global lexicon is changing as the novel Coronavirus (Covid-19), becomes a pandemic spreading rapidly across the world. Humanity is scrambling to cope, and if there was ever a time for the combined efforts of the technology and human rights communities, it is now. Applying the same human rights offline and online sounds simple: doing so, as outlined in previous chapters, can be messy, complicated, intense, confusing and even fractious. Yet, as the pandemic spreads, something incredible is happening, something that would never have seemed possible back in 2010: human rights online and offline are a critical part of responding to a global health crisis. This chapter explores some of the tensions that emerged – between human rights and technology design, between conflicting rights to privacy and health, and between regulatory responses – and how human rights, science and technical communities responded to those tensions in rights-affirming ways.

COVID-19

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause illness in animals or humans. In humans, several of these coronaviruses cause respiratory infections, ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In December 2019, a new coronavirus caused a new type of coronavirus disease: Covid-19.

We may never know exactly how the outbreak began, but this much appears agreed on by reputable medical and scientific organisations. In late 2019, news of an undiagnosed illness began emerging from Wuhan, China. On 31 December 2019, Chinese national authorities informed the WHO China Country Office of cases of pneumonia with an unknown cause. The clinical signs were ‘mainly fever, with a few patients having difficulty in breathing and chest radiographs showing invasive lesions of both lungs’. By 3 January 2020, there were 44 reported cases, 11 of whom were severely ill, while 33 were in a stable condition. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission initiated a public health response, carrying out a range of measures, including active case finding, tracing close contacts of patients, and environmental hygiene investigations.