There Is an App for That: Technological Solutionism as COVID-19 Policy in the Global North

The COVID-19 pandemic took high-income countries entirely by surprise. Despite funding pandemic preparedness programs in Asia for more than 20 years, donor countries had not experienced an uncontrolled pandemic since HIV in the 1980s. When Ebola, Zika, SARS, and MERS threatened, countries outside the immediate geographic neighborhood or income level of those diseases’ places of origin were left largely untouched. In contrast to the swift, comprehensive response of South-East Asian countries, authorities in Europe and the United States assumed this coronavirus would behave like its predecessors SARS and MERS.