Viral Surveillance: Governing Social Isolation in São Paulo, Brazil, During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the context of COVID-19 pandemics, Brazilian cities implemented social isolation policies and deployed digital systems to monitor urban mobility. This article addresses the setting of two digital technologies based on massive cell-phone data collection by private companies in São Paulo state. We relied on secondary data from multiple sources (press conferences, interviews, newspaper articles, public documents), complemented by primary data from the authors’ ongoing research. In our analysis of heterogeneous and contingent techniques of pandemic control, we found that although these monitoring technologies seem to be effective in assisting public services and informing society, they also raise issues about performativity and transparency, with relevant consequences for their adoption in sanitary emergencies, and their potential legacy to São Paulo’s public safety management.Funding: This work was supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp) under the Grants No. 2016/24525-3, No. 2019/02612-0, and No. 2013/07923-7; and Capes Research Foundation, Grant No. 88887.368551/2019-00.Declaration of Interest: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.Ethical Approval: The research we developed did not involve any kind of research or experiment with humans or animals. The research effort was limited to consultation of websites, newspaper articles, public information, and published papers, requiring no form of authorization to do so. This said, according to the Elsevier’s Ethical Guidelines for Journal Publication (version 2.0, May 2017), no ethical approval statement is required for this specific research.