Crises are often depicted as being discrete events. Yet within every crisis there are evolutions, changes in the choices available to governments and consequently new dilemmas to be faced. In this chapter, we present a novel periodisation of pandemic governance, focusing on four European countries: France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. We divide the pandemic into three periods based on the tools available in countering COVID-19. A first period, during the initial outbreak, when governments resorted to imprecise instruments—such as lockdowns and furlough schemes—to mitigate the oncoming epidemiological and economic disaster. A second period, beginning in the summer of 2020, characterised by innovation in public policy, with the introduction of track-and-trace apps and targeted non-pharmaceutical interventions supported by improved data collection, which largely ended in failure when Europe was engulfed in a second and more severe wave of COVID-19 during the winter of 2020. A third period, when the vaccine’s release moved policy makers’ focus from regulating public space to controlling individual bodies, balancing coercion and persuasion in their pursuit of greater vaccine uptake. Despite governments’ rapidly changing technological capacity throughout these periods, we argue one important tension remained: the conflict between individual rights and collective duties.