Week Six: Drones: Combating The World's Newest Pandemic

It seems that every time I log onto Twitter or scroll through Facebook, I see an increasingly scary update about the spread of the Coronavirus. The headlines read, “The World Health Organization announces Coronavirus is now deadlier than the flu”, “US Coronavirus cases climb past 120”, and most recently “First North Carolina Coronavirus case”. The stories get worse the more you read. It does not help my conscious that the Panther Plague, the student-given name for the cold that spreads easily at High Point University, has been running rampant the last few weeks, causing many of my friends to fall ill, while my blood pressure skyrockets. The scariest headline I’ve seen is “Steve Wozniak believes he is ‘Patient Zero’ for COVID-19 in the United States”. I honestly gasped when I read that headline, after all, I just met the Apple co-founder when he spoke at HPU last month, this is not the type of news I enjoy seeing. I have now gone to the length of muting the word “corona”, “virus”, and “pandemic” from my social media pages.

Believe it or not, something that did calm my nerves was doing my communication timeline project for my Media Law and Literacy course. The topic researched was how drones have become useful as a communication tool. During my research, I found that drones are now being used to fight the new virus and stop the spread of disease. Gone are the days of needing to stick a thermometer in your mouth, or needing a mother’s touch on the forehead to find out if you’re sick. The quadcopter Draganflyer X4-ES is being used to save human lives, with a built-in thermal measuring device that can detect a person’s facial temperature from up to 100 yards away! The camera on the drone, paired with AI, can monitor people to see if they exhibit signs of coronavirus, such as watery eyes and high blood pressure. With this new technology, we can identify what people need assistance, and deliver medication to afflicted people, without having to expose doctors, nurses and first responders to the disease.

This type of technology and innovation in surveillance and communication is what has inspired me to become a communication major. Innovations like this will save lives and make the world a better place. While it does provide benefits, there is an ethical dilemma that this creates. Although this technology is extremely beneficial for this purpose, in the wrong hands it could be used for malicious purposes, such as spying on people without their permission and violating their privacy. Where do we draw the line on what technology is beneficial, and what is harmful? Is it okay to use this technology without people’s expressed permission? These are the questions that the next generation of humanity will be faced with, but for now, it is being used for good.

Self-proclaimed "patient zero" of the Coronavirus in the United States Steve Wozniak and I, when I met him last month.