There has been some psychological research which hints at this relation of how diseases from outsiders bias decisions against those communities. The literature

There has been some psychological research which hints at this relation of how diseases from outsiders bias decisions against those communities. The literature seems to suggest that it's an evolutionary response to protect the community and these biases are difficult to detect because they are so innate in how we assess risk and process threats to a group. I was just saying the other day that we're one Coronovirus-like pandemic away from seeing sweeping changes in government policy that lend themselves to authoritarian rule. Changes that go beyond what we've seen on removing the red tape around how hospitals are run and how the spaces within them can re-purposed for other use. Imagine a virus that has the properties similar to covd-19 but a higher mortality rate, affecting children and working age groups. Containment of a pandemic would be trivial if you knew the location of infected patient and everybody with whom they've been in contact with over a 14 day period. That data is already available from the fact most people are mobile phone users. It's just the data is not shared. Containment would be more specific and targeted. At the moment health professionals rely on self-reporting by patients to follow the spread of a pandemic. The pretext for dissolving these artificial boundaries between the pools of data owned by corporations, intelligence services, health institutions would be easy to provide in the interest of protecting the government and the public. It would seem both responsible and reasonable to the public if the mortality and symptoms were terrifying enough. It can be argued that China's alleged effectiveness in dealing with the virus in cities with populations larger than LA, London and NY was due to an authoritarian government model. We also see our governments working with the private sector to handle this pandemic. Governments are scared because they do not have visibility on the pandemic's spread because of problems in scaling tests, using numbers of confirmed cases serve as poor proxies for decisions to be made. I don't think it would be long before someone starts asking the question, if we had richer data on confirmed patients and who they'd been in contact with, could we have nipped this in the but before it had the impact its had on the economy and put the health system at risk.