Pre-emptive lockdowns

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many public health authorities employed "circuit breaker" lockdowns. These stay-at-home orders were emergency measures, taken to halt chains of transmission. But some are considering more proactive use of this tool, scheduling prophylactic lockdowns lasting two weeks, and timed to conincide with school holidays to reduce disruption. Used periodically even when infection rates are low, these approaches could achieve substantial suprression of the virus and, with advance notice and known durations, would be easier for the public to plan around.

To make such anticipatory moves feasible, governments would need to tap a wide range of urban technologies to ensure that predictions are accurate—and that such measures make sense, and aren't arbitrary or even uncessary—and that they are fairly enforced across all classes, regions and groups. This would require a tremendous degree of coordinated information dissemination and monitoring—it is unclear how this could be done without paying a heavy price in terms of new mass surveillance of populations or other schemes that mobilize urban tech for enforcement.