Ethics for integrating emerging technologies to contain COVID‐19 in Zimbabwe

Mbunge, Elliot; Fashoto, Stephen G.; Akinnuwesi, Boluwaji; Metfula, Andile; Simelane, Sakhile; Ndumiso, Nzuza

Zimbabwe is among the countries affected with the coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) and implemented several infection control and measures such as social distancing, contact tracing, regular temperature checking in strategic entry and exit points, face masking among others. The country also implemented recursive national lockdowns and curfews to reduce the virus transmission rate and its catastrophic impact. These large‐scale measures are not easy to implement, adhere to and subsequently difficult to practice and maintain which lead to imperfect public compliance, especially if there is a significant impact on social and political norms, economy, and psychological wellbeing of the affected population. Also, emerging COVID‐19 variants, porous borders, regular movement of informal traders and sale of fake vaccination certificates continue to threaten impressive progress made towards virus containment. Therefore, several emerging technologies have been adopted to strengthen the health system and health services delivery, improve compliance, adherence and maintain social distancing. These technologies use health data, symptoms monitoring, mobility, location and proximity data for contact tracing, self‐isolation, and quarantine compliance. However, the use of emerging technologies has been debatable and contentious because of the potential violation of ethical values such as security and privacy, data format and management, synchronization, over‐tracking, over‐surveillance and lack of proper development and implementation guidelines which impact their efficacy, adoption and ultimately influence public trust. Therefore, the study proposes ethical framework for using emerging technologies to contain the COVID‐19 pandemic. The framework is centered on ethical practices such as security, privacy, justice, human dignity, autonomy, solidarity, beneficence, and non‐maleficence.