Contract Tracing South Korea
Bloomberg reports These Elite Contact Tracers Show the World How to Beat Covid-19
In May, when a coronavirus outbreak hit nightclubs in the South Korean capital of Seoul, health officials quickly unleashed their version of the Navy Seals — elite teams of epidemiologists, database specialists and laboratory technicians.
An old-school, shoe-leather investigation showed the virus had jumped from a night-club visitor, to a student, to a taxi driver and then alarmingly to a warehouse employee who worked with 4,000 others.
Thousands of the employee’s co-workers, their family members and contacts were approached and 9,000 people were eventually tested. Two weeks later, the warehouse flareup was mostly extinguished and infections curtailed at 152.
The work of such so-called Immediate Response Teams offers a look at how South Korea — once the second worst hit by the coronavirus — has succeeded in largely quelling its spread without the lockdowns that have derailed lives worldwide.
South Korea’s strategy is also a contrast with the harsh shutdowns instituted in parts of China or the tourism blockade implemented by New Zealand in an attempt to completely stamp out the virus. The Asian nation meticulously targets dangerous hotspots and then simply allows most people to lead lives and run businesses unimpeded.
Contract Tracing Singapore
Singapore started Nationwide Contact Tracing in September
Singapore will begin issuing COVID-19 contact tracing wearables to all residents and introduce additional safety measures as it looks to resume more public activities in the coming weeks. These new measures will include the mandatory use of the TraceTogether Tokens or contact tracing app TraceTogether to facilitate digital check-in procedures at some locations where “higher-risk activities” are held.
To date, its TraceTogether app has topped 2.4 million downloads, accounting for about 40% of the local population.
An initial batch of 10,000 Bluetooth-enabled TraceTogether Tokens were distributed to the elderly in June, days after the country’s plans to introduce the wearables sparked public outcry amongst individuals concerned about their privacy. It prompted the government to reveal that the contact tracing devices did not contain a GPS chip and would not have internet or cellular connectivity, so the data collected could only be extracted when the devices were physically handed over to a health official.
Contact Tracing Australia
The COVIDSafe app is part of our work to slow the spread of COVID-19. COVIDSafe supports the current manual process of finding people who have been in close contact with someone with COVID-19.
The COVIDSafe app is completely voluntary. Downloading the app is something you can do to protect you, your family and friends and save the lives of other Australians. The more Australians connect to the COVIDSafe app, the quicker we can find the virus and prevent the spread.
In many cases, people won’t know the names and contact details of everyone they’ve been in close contact with (for example, on public transport). COVIDSafe uses technology to make this process faster and more accurate.
State and territory health officials can only access app information if someone tests positive and agrees to the information in their phone being uploaded. The health officials can only use the app information to help alert those who may need to quarantine or get tested.
COVIDSafe stores contacts on the phone for 21 days. This allows for the 14-day incubation period of the coronavirus, plus the time taken to confirm a positive test result. The rolling 21-day window allows COVIDSafe to continuously note only those contacts that occur during the coronavirus incubation window. It automatically deletes contacts older than 21 days.
Nobody can access the encrypted information on your phone, including you.
Downloading and using COVIDSafe is voluntary. The app has a range of privacy and security safeguards built in. It uses secure encryption and does not collect data on your location.
New Cases Per Million
Tests Per Confirmed Case
It’s a lot easier to know who to test in a timely manner with contract tracing.
Singapore and Australia have done a massive amount of testing per case: 4,062 and 3,848 respectively.
In contrast the US has done 13.5 tests per case. Spain, Italy, and the UK are even worse than the US.
Guess which countries have problems and which don’t.
Contact Tracing Is Badly Underused by the U.S.
Scientific American reports Contact Tracing, a Key Way to Slow COVID-19, Is Badly Underused by the U.S.
The tracing approach is built on a simple idea: When someone tests positive for the new coronavirus or becomes sick with COVID-19, you find all the people the infected person came into contact with, because they, too, may be infected.
Contact tracing is a tried-and-true method that epidemiologists have been using for decades to tackle everything from foodborne illnesses to sexually transmitted diseases, as well as recent outbreaks of SARS and Ebola. “It’s a great tool for bringing an epidemic into the suppression or containment phase,” says special pathogens expert Syra Madad of NYC Health + Hospitals, which leads New York City’s Test & Trace Corps contact-tracing program.
Large-scale contact-tracing programs in places such as South Korea and Germany have been instrumental in suppressing the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Within days of detecting its first case on January 20, South Korea created an emergency response committee that quickly developed wide-scale virus testing, followed by an extensive scaling up of the nation’s network of contact tracers. Germany similarly committed resources to mobilizing a tracing workforce. In both countries, cases have dropped dramatically.
A look at some individual states makes it clear that the workforce has not reached the scale required in several places. For instance, Arkansas recently announced plans to hire 350 new contact tracers, which would bring its total to about 900. But based on the number of current cases, the state actually needs 3,722 tracers, according to a contact-tracing-workforce estimator developed by the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University. In Florida, where the pandemic is surging terribly, the same estimator calculates that 291 tracers per 100,000 residents are needed. Yet as of early July, the state had only seven per 100,000. And cases of COVID-19 surged in Texas, even as contact tracers working for the Texas Department of State Health Services were taken off the job.
Though numerous phone apps now aid in identifying potential contacts, “technology can’t solve the problem of convincing someone they should pick up the phone when a contact tracer calls,” says Mary Gray, a social scientist at Microsoft Research, who also has affiliations with Harvard University and Indiana University Bloomington. “It is the reason we are failing—because we keep searching for something else we can buy or put into place. We have not conceded how deeply human this process is.”
One of the biggest challenges is misinformation being disseminated on social media. BuzzFeed News reports that “Facebook posts and YouTube videos spreading hoaxes and lies about contact tracers have received hundreds of thousands of views.” Some of these posts compare tracers to Nazi secret police and falsely say they take people to internment camps. Others suggest they should be greeted with guns. Contact tracers report they have faced death threats.
The next action that comes after a tracer has identified a potential infected person—getting that individual to adhere to quarantine—has proved exceptionally difficult in the U.S. For stopping the spread of a virus, however, isolation is absolutely key. “You can do the contact tracing all you want. But if you’re not also providing these support services people need to isolate, it won’t work,” Madad says. No one is going to quarantine for 14 days if that means losing a job and income or abandoning caregiving.
Personal Anecdote
A friend of mine back in Illinois just informed me that she went in for Covid testing. The test facility said results would take 3 to 7 days.
Is this totally nuts or what?
She went to a second place that told her it would be expensive to do the test unless her plan covered it. Most plans don’t but her plan did. She was positive and two days later started vomiting.
How many people who are asymptomatic or have very minor symptoms will bother to quarantine for 7 days waiting for a damn test?
Is it any wonder this is spreading like mad?
Addendum
Another comment from a friend I trust 100%
.
My daughter who lives in Ludington [Michigan], is on the board for the Jaycees. They always have a Halloween party, and she wanted to find a way to do it this year. She offered to have it at her house, did everything outside. Several of the board members did not come because they thought she was being too crazy about being careful. There were 10 people there.
The next day one of their friends started to feel bad. On Sunday he got tested for Covid. He did not get his results until the following Friday. And, yes, he was positive. His wife was not, but their son was also positive.
Right now we have a country where about half the people think wearing a mask in public places is an infringement of their personal liberty.
Understanding the Problem
The main problem is not insufficient contract tracing, it is piss poor policy on the need for testing and terrible delays in getting results from tests.
I provided two examples from people I trust 100% on these delays.
If it takes 2-3 days to get results from a test, and people are reluctant to get a test, and individuals have to take it upon themselves to follow up on contacts, guess what? Contact tracing is useless.
I do not support forced contact tracing. I do support voluntary contact tracing and I am sure it would help, but only if we had more testing and faster results.
Addendum II
I cannot vouch for these comments but they ring true given what I do know.
Thanks will add to my addendum. https://t.co/IbW8sxaC9T
— Mike “Mish” Shedlock (@MishGEA) November 8, 2020
Thanks
Will add that to my addendum https://t.co/1EtfaU3hay— Mike “Mish” Shedlock (@MishGEA) November 8, 2020
Thanks
Will add that to my addendum as well. https://t.co/KfdabcGbQs— Mike “Mish” Shedlock (@MishGEA) November 8, 2020
Mish
MISH OUT OF TOUCH
Our CHURCH has been OPEN SINCE MAY – over 2,000 members
masks OPTIONAL – not 1 case of covid YET
HALLOWEEN – we had our fall festival – around 100 – NO MASKS – kids having great time in SAFE environment
oops – STILL NO COVID
As an Aussie, I would remove the COVIDSafe app section as if you actually looking into what it has achieved (rather than copy/paste some government marketing) it doesn’t support your argument. It is widely recognised as a complete joke and hasn’t helped Australia at all. The NSW government was/is quite good at contract tracing, the Victorian government was awful at it and only got the virus back under control via a brutal 14 week lockdown. Other states never really had very serious outbreaks.
It’s actually kind of funny to see someone thinking Australia’s contract tracing app is a success story.
Mish, I congratulate you on another leading edge idea. It should also be mandatory for cases of tracing VD and where the “Single Moms” were passed around. After all, it’s all for the public good and we’re all in this together!
Another comment from a friend I trust 100%
My daughter who lives in Ludington, is on the board for the Jaycees. They always have a Halloween party, and she wanted to find a way to do it this year. She offered to have it at her house, did everything outside. Several of the board members did not come because they thought she was being too crazy about being careful. There were 10 people there.
The next day one of their friends started to feel bad. On Sunday he got tested for Covid. He did not get his results until the following Friday. And, yes, he was positive. His wife was not, but their son was also positive.
The world is swarming with the infected.
And the infection will be overcome by our immune systems. Some will not be strong enough to fight the infection. This is how Nature works.
But if that doesn’t work for you, perhaps you could try praying to your god? That doesn’t generally work for weather, disease, hunger or any other kind of malady avoidance but what the hey…
I hope your daughter and everyone else at the party manages to avoid it.
Mish, is that ferry boat shuttle still going from Luddington to Manitowoc WI? Could be a source.
I am a US citizen in New Zealand since last November. I went thru the hard lock-down and watched contract tracing at work here in a country that has contained and controlled transmission. After having been thru it here…. I would say that America is past the point where contract tracing can be effectively used in the way that it has been in Taiwan or Australia. A few weeks ago; NZ had a single worker at a managed Covid isolation facility become infected. That single case resulted in thousands and thousands of close and near contract traces. Once the virus is in the general population and running rampant (as in the USA)… the only means at the countries disposal would be a VERY HARD and complete lockdown. All schools must close, almost all business need to shutter, you stay at home, and so on. America would be incapable of doing this. Heck, Americans can’t even agree on wearing a mask!… and a huge percentage believes the Covid-19 virus is nothing or little to be concerned about.
I feel very lucky to be ‘stuck’ in New Zealand during Covid.
The U.S. would have to greatly reduce the infection rate before we could contemplate contact tracing. Only works in states with low level of virus
Stupidity rules in the US until at least January. The ‘president’ has buggered off to the golf course to sulk, and might not come back to work, which would be a net positive.
Joe Biden is making Covid-19 his first priority. I’m sure he will follow the science and listen to the virologists and pandemic experts. Hopefully Fauci stays on.
Trump fired 3 department heads as of Friday. I hope he gets Fauci next.
Scorched earth tactics make you feel good?
That’s great news. I hope this charade continues as long as I never be have to set foot in Chicago for an office job or meeting the rest of my life.
We can continue to ignore COVID with the belief that it will magically go away one day but that will come at a cost of over 2,000 deaths a day come January. Some of the less empathic will shrug and say it is mainly the elderly and those predisposed with preexisting conditions. Or we can try to drive the numbers down to a manageable level where contact tracing might actually be viable. It is a sad indictment of our country that the worst pandemic in 100 years became a highly politicized event. I strongly believe Trump might actually have won this past election if he had stepped up and shown some real leadership instead of trying to wish it away.
There is no question that he would have. He could also have botched covid, and showed leadership in the Floyd situation, but he was 0-2 and still nearly won.
Trump was mayor of Minneapolis and Governor of Minnesota?
“Or we can try to drive the numbers down to a manageable level where contact tracing might actually be viable.”
Why?
I guess you would be one of the less empathic. To avoid unnecessary deaths.
You are born to die. Most people, including myself, will contribute little to nothing of any lasting value to the world. Whether we live or die makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. I guess you can call this the nihilist POV.
And the sooner we get this virus under control the sooner we can return to normalcy. The US economy will never fully recover until we do so.
Until you have full voter identification there should be no talk of track & trace.
A common conceit of Americans is that their lives are interesting enough that someone would want to spy on them.
YES, everyone happens to be interesting enough in his or her capacity as a consumption slave, that’s why facebook and Twitter, just to name a few, are available for free….To spy on you, initially for commercial purposes but where does it end ?
Excellent point. A Covid app could hardly do a more invasive job of spying on you than Twitter or Facebook.
More fundamental than that. In many places voter ID is not needed but suddenly track & trace is interesting. Have both or neither otherwise it’s not fair.
I really don’t get how you can vote without identifying yourself…. or didn’t until I tried to get a license from the California DMV. A third world civic experience, right here in the richest state in the country.
The best is behind the US. By 2030 it will be behind China and the EU except for the ability to kill en mass.
Whoever won the Presedential role will regret having done so and there’s no stopping the rot.
Decay in the currency and questions on the legitimacy of the election process are symptoms, not causes. Both could be addressed but no political will.
Just the cycle of empire in action, past peak and on the downward ramp. No reverse gear.
Live for today. Don’t worry about the future that you can’t really control.
Very true, and better a small well tended own garden than a large one unkempt when both are infinitessimally small compared to the total.
That is true Jojo.
Sometimes before a bid race I’ll listen to The Grassroots song of the same theme, to charge me up. Creed Bratton’s guitar part is the best.
The trashy scandal sheets by the cash registers in grocery stores in the middle of nowhere are still loaded with Royal Family Nonsense. Imagine what’s it like over there? A country of perverted peeping toms.
Trump was right in the essential principles of foreign policy: America First and mild isolationism. link to glineq.blogspot.com
How did he end up ceding so much ground to Russia and China on the global leadership ? Enabling autocracies and communists isnt the stuff of America first. If Trump had promoted democracy in his policies then he would have a leg to stand on. We now know he himself doesn’t believe in democratic processes and governments.
The best presidents were the ones after Lincoln but before Wilson that nobody remembers. Let the global leadership crowd continue WWI without my kids, let them drown in their own blood.
This was always going to be the way we were headed, based on demographics worldwide, energy, and changing patterns of consumption……it’s a megatrend in progress….some people think it will speed up, regardless of who is POTUS.
Enter people that use the app into a free prize draw.
I’m another person who doesn’t trust the government. When in public I’ll wear a mask out of respect for others. When I see someone without a mask (a week ago at the hardware store) I won’t confront the individual.
The mask thing will result in a windfall for endodontics, more painful root canals and expensive crowns with all the bacteria build up in the mouth.
Science!!!
With all those ‘blue’ celebrations going on, very often without masks and definitely without social distancing, C cases will surge dramatically in coming weeks….. Election celebration, hahaha….This can only happen in gullibly entoosed America! Here in Europe, the plebs NEVER celebrate elections, unlike you we are very much aware that some political jerks will be substituted with other jerks, and that’s about it , nothing fundamental will ever change, business as usual…. or even worse, the way things have been developing in recent years….
Not having a blue celebration…..but definitely celebrating the departure of a right-wing demagogue….and doing so privately, on my own property.
If it had gone the other way I’d expected a load of Nikes from The Mag Mile Store to materialize at the Alsip Flea Market.
It also seems like a great beta test for any future authoritarian states need to track it citizens..
Exhibit A: New Zealand.
Runner up UK
We are too cantankerous for contact tracing.
It’s one of the costs of freedom.
Nope. You can’t make anyone submit to it. And even if you could, people would erase their phones and reload them. We don’t live in China with their cellphone driven social credit system.
I think something like that credit system exists here.
I have no bias one way or another but as Mish has a libertarian bent I’m surprised he even asks the question.
Contract tracing doesn’t work well here because there are too many people in the USA who are free to move about as they wish. Then there is the problem as to how you coordinate tracing from one locale to another, especially as you cross city/county/state borders. Someone is paying for the contract tracing work and are they going to pay to run through people in other locales. I’d bet no.
And of course, you have all the privacy issues. I certainly would not run a Covid app on my phone nor reply to any queries as to who I have been in contact with. And I don’t believe that anyone can make me do so.
Read my comment on Japan, where they haven’t used such a scatter shot approach.
The apps are an attempt to use tech to be “doing something”. I have not seen any stories about success, but have not been following reports about apps.
You do know people in Europe are (or were) “free to move about”.
Same in Asia, for the most part.
Americans will do the right thing…..as soon as they try everything else first, it fails miserably, and things get so bad that people in their own circle are dying…
This attitude of “it’s so inconvenient and it invades my privacy” will sound pretty dumb if it gets bad enough….and it very well might.
About fifty percent of the electorate wants authoritarianism anyway. If they get ordered to comply, they will, even the “freedom” crowd. Especially the freedom crowd…when their preachers and pundits do a 180 and tell them to do it.
I think the Avocado Toast Brunch At The Bistro Crowd wants authoritarianism a bit more than the preacher crowd. My religion is Church Of The Sunday Long Run, so I’m good if they stay of the trails. I have a better chance winning a powerball lottery without buying a ticket than running into Governor Fatso on the trails.
Not true at all. Taiwan borders were closed as were SK, NZ and many others. I am not sure if the EU countries closed borders (I think many did) but if they didn’t, it would be because they were viewed the same as states in the USA.
Seriously, instead of trying to show how many misleading posts you can make in a single day, repeated day after day after day, why not try researching before you post? Yes, I know it would reduce your garbage posting totals but…
In Australia, the CovidSafe app was largely a fallback for the existing contact tracing (using the phone, and contact lists required by all businesses such as restaurants, hairdressers and gyms). In NSW, we had daily announcements on the TV and Radio of all locations that had cases. People are encouraged to come forward for testing, even with little or no symptoms. The testing is free and available to anyone, although the criteria changes a bit from week to week. We had pop-up testing centres set up in particular areas where hotspots emerged. If the testing drops below certain thresholds, people are encouraged to come forward by the government.
This culture of diving on any residual cases has made it safe for the rest of the population to return to some sort of normality until 100% of cases are eliminated or a vaccine can be distributed (likely in 2021). In some states of Australia, the virus has been completely eliminated, which means that life has largely returned to normal, with people going to the office instead of working-from-home.
It is strange to read of the outbreaks in so many supposedly developed countries. Rampant spread and hospitals filling again. Most of Oz has been back to near enough normal for months. In many places the pandemic hardly happened at all. All it took was an active and co-ordinated government response and basic co-operation by the populace.
Not that hard. Seriously, if the next pandemic is something that also spreads quickly, but is more deadly how will the Americas and Europe cope. The promotion of personal rights at the level of infantile tantrums, over collective responsibility, community, while ensure the decline and fall of the west.
The Trumpista are the ones that will destroy what they make out they champion
Cooperation isnt something you get in the united states on anything. The country was founded on government skeptics and lawlessness.
Sorry Mish, but you should have done more research into the Australian Covid app.
It only found 14 instances in all the months of operation.
thank you MISH BIDEN for supporting dimwit causes
I remember the heady days at the beginning of the year on ZH where they were laughing about Covid, saying only Asian people could get it. There was also no small amount of schadenfreude sparked by this conclusion. They’re definitely not laughing now, but that may be because they’re busy declaring that Trump will still win the election.
East and southeast Asia seem to be the only real success stories. A few factors may be causing this, including that they’re being careful, they’re willing to cooperate with each other, and they’re not corpulent pigs like a lot of people are in the West.
Asking why contact tracing doesn’t work in the U.S. is like asking why can’t Yemen make its own computer chips. Contact tracing can not work in a third world nation like the U.S. where a large segment of the population doesn’t have Healthcare. That you ask such a question calls into question your basic critical thinking skills.
Can’t resist this one….
Trump tweeted about a big news conference at the Four Seasons in Philly today.
And then Trump modified the venue to Four Seasons Total Landscaping in an industrial area of Philadelphia
The new conference was held in the parking lot of the landscaping business, which is located by a sex store and a crematorium. The landscaping business was closed on Saturday. There was a sale on at the sex store. No word on the happenings at the crematorium.
Rudy Guiliani spoke of voter fraud and impending major lawsuits.
The pictures of the event are hilarious. Rudy looks rediculous. The current Yelp reviews on the landscaping company are funny. ( Example review–Avoid like the plague, terrible people. Said they were going to build a wall four years ago and that my neighbor would pay for it. Never came through, just a bunch of lies and for whatever reason they spend way too much time on Twitter. Seriously just strange people.)
I know people fall fast, but this is bizarre. Who has a press conference on serious national issues in the parking lot of a random small business?
Unless Rudy is trying to out-Borat Borat.
haha…Rudy said, “Do you think we’re stupid?” haha. Well, yes, I do actually! Haha
It is stunning to think Rudy was the mayor of NYC during 9/11. Talk about legacies being tarnished.
Yep, he was “America’s Mayor” after 9/11. Really sad to see what he’s turned in to because of his association with Trump.
that was just surreal.
ETTD (everything touched by Trump dies)
As for us, we have dropped out of the covid freak-out program, on the advice of our doctors.
In Japan they have been smarter about track & trace. Instead of wasting a lot of time trying to map out all contacts (many of which are asymptomatic and not contagious), they have been trying to track backwards to the origin of the infection. We already know that most people to not spread the disease, and that 8% of the infected are responsible for 60% of the spread. Tracing back to the origin and quarantining the super-spreaders makes a lot more sense than attempting to track and quarantine scores of asymptomatic or non-contagious individuals, focusing your resources on the vectors that matter.
Of course any strategy that has a built in latency of 3-4 days between test and result is pretty much doomed to going through the motions, pretending you’re doing something about it.
Blame it in part on the insane comment that “more testing means that you find more cases”. The point that you WANT to find more cases if you want to slow the spread. Every case that you don’t find is someone who can spread the virus to others.
PCR tests are not a diagnostic tool and hence do not indicate ‘cases’. They also do not indicate whether someone is contagious, nor to what extent they may be.
You are correct that PCR tests do not indicate the severity of the infection, nor the level of contagiousness, but that has nothing to do with the point I made. Clearly, if you test less, you will find a smaller portion of the people who are highly contagious, and the disease will spread faster.
oh please, I’m in Oregon where nearly every elected official is a Democrat and the citizenry opposes anything Trump says without so much as considering the merit.
Weds I had a sore throat and assumed it was a cold.
By Friday morning, I had 8 of the 10 COVID screening symptoms, the most concerning was a complete loss of smell.
I naively thought I’d go get a test. There was no way for me to test that day or Saturday (today). I found 1 test available on Sunday morning 31 miles from my home. So I’m waiting to take that tomorrow. No clue how long before I find out my status after taking it.
This is a bi-partisan failure at all levels of government. States can function without Federal direction. People need to stop pointing fingers at Trump, he’s irrelevant now. He may have politicized it, but the Dems decided that was a good idea for them too and ran with it.
9 months into this an you can’t take a test to know whether you should quarantine.
The option is to quarantine 14 days for every sniffle (might as well quit work and anything else you have going on) or to ignore every symptom and live your life, potentially infecting others. Guess what working people are going to do?
Different states have done different things with regards to testing. If Oregon had take the approach that the answer was less testing, you might not be able to get one at all.
Good luck with your infection, ajc. I hope it’s not severe, whatever it turns out to be.
Thanks for the wishes — I went through 8 of 10 “classic” C19 symptoms but all reasonably mild. My 3YO boy went through them with me. 5YO boy and pregnant wife… had what seemed like sniffles for a day.
I was finally able to test this morning, waiting on results.
Here in OR, if you have insurance through Kaiser or Providence, you must test through them. Fortunately I didn’t, so the public testing was an option. There are less public centers open for testing now than there were in May.
Something smells fishy, and while I’m sure some blame falls on Trump, I’ve gotta think there’s more to it than just him.
Largest COVID-19 contact tracing study to date finds children key to spread, evidence of superspreaders link to princeton.edu
Contact tracing works but the virus level has to be low. In many parts of the country it’s too high.
Contract tracing potentially involves privacy issues, those need to be overcome. In Israel they are using some of the same surveillance tools they use to track terrorists onto their own citizens. It’s also a management issue. Deblasio has totally failed at running a good program.
Biggest reason its not being done in the U.S. across the country is because the Federal government isn’t championing it. I agree where it is being employed countries are far more effective at keeping the virus in check. But in a country where the Federal government won’t get behind basic social distancing and mask wearing contact tracing seems like a pipe dream. Maybe we’ll revisit these issues after January.
I agree. I think it’s too late to make contact tracing tenable. We lost containment back in April.
The combinations of contacts for an event like the Sturgis motorcycle rally would be immense, and intractable, IMO.
But we can still suppress it with masks. If everyone wore an N95 (big ask, I know), we could maybe even beat it.
No. On Jan 24 when we learned 5 million people had left Wuhan.
You are spreading disinformation.
According to the WHO we moved from containment to mitigation on March 11.
In April we were way past containment, but at least 50% of the news cycle is dominated by an obtuse unwillingness to understand this point. Flattening the curve was an attempt to change the shape of the area under the curve, not to decrease the area. Flattening the curve is mitigation, not containment. Track&Trace applies mostly to the containment phase, but can also be applied to mitigate. It will mainly have the effect of stretching infections out across time, not to diminish the eventual total amount of infection.
Social media…….we live in a world chock-full of dangerous misinformation…brought to us by all kinds of nut cases, with all kinds of axes to grind.
Same reason people are afraid to get vaccinated….with something as incredibly safe and efficacious as the measles vaccine.
People love to mistrust authority these days……even when it’s in their own best interest….and people are not that well educated in this country…..
And…we have a President who thought it would be a good idea to have fifty different state programs competing with each other for resources, instead of a coherent national approach…and his motivation for that was he thought it would help him win an election……and it allowed him to punch his political opponents in certain blue states.
Those are all reasons we don’t have contact tracing.
punish, not punch
It makes sense either way…
How about because these countries trust their governments to not abuse the data they collect? A database of contacts (even when somewhat anonymized) on every American is just too tempting for law enforcement to not grab. San Diego installed “smart street lights” that have cameras installed. The local PD immediately pounced on the camera feeds, even though the system was sold to the public to be used “for urban planning.” The PD used the system 400 times since 2018. And there’s the whole Ring doorbell network, where local PDs can use your doorbell to spy on your neighbors. We know that it is fairly routine for law enforcement at all levels get access to cellular metadata to do some data drag-netting. And even if there’s specific legislation passed to try to prevent this from happening there will be language tacked on (probably in reconciliation) that grants exceptions.
“Contact Tracing is a Huge Success So Why Won’t The US Use It?”
Because the U.S. has one of the highest rate of people with no healthcare, and those with no healthcare have a financial incentive to resist/evade contract tracing. It can possibly land them with huge bills they can’t afford.
Sorta like people when polled shy from saying they will vote for Trump but that’s another matter.
Most of the rest of the world provides healthcare to it’s citizens, and thus the financial ruin that a U.S. citizen might face by being quarentined and forced to get health does not exist. That is also why people in other nations live longer lives than Americans, and have better medical outcomes, and better quality healthcare than U.S. citizens have, at about half the cost Americans pay.
Socialized medicine wipes libertarian medicine on every front.
Those of us who enlightened are reside in the reality base community have know this for a very long time.
Many Americans’ deep seated distrust of government makes contract tracing apps politically challenging. Until society becomes more community minded and less individualistic, this will be an ongoing issue. Libertarianism focuses too much on individual freedom, and doesn’t suffiiently convey that individual freedom is enhanced by strong and diverse community.
I know libertarians that are some of the most community spirited people its possible to meet. You appear to have some inner bias at work. I have also come across some supposedly “community spirited” types that are just weird control freeks. Values matter, not the label of the individual.
People don’t trust Government because Government has not proven itself trustworthy, mainly because of the type of people the roles attract. Seeking power over others, adulation, lack or real world outside of politics, convinced of their own image of the way the world should be etc.
Why no tracing?
Federal top-down incompetence and denigration of the seriousness of the pandemic.
After all, we’re going down the herd-immunity path for the next few months (thanks, Scott Atlas, radiologist). You’re going to get it, just accept it and hope for the best. Who gives a damn where you got it.
When’s the last time you heard the WH talk about the vaccine?
Talk about dropping the issue after the election.
Because the so-called threat is minimal… always getting your undies in a bunch, Mish.
In Belgium we have had contract tracing for months before the present lockdown, we are disciplined folks wearing masks and keeping distances…and enjoy state of the art medical care on top of that……Look where we are !
….Simon Dellicour, a bioengineer and research associate at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, said the recent spike in cases is due to a “relatively high population density,” increased testing capacity and a rapid relaxation of the rules at the end of the summer….
…..partying university students in september, thousands of them, every night in Brussels, Gent, Leuven, Antwerp….they caused the second wave…
FOCUS CORONAVIRUS
CORONAVIRUS
Anti-mask protesters pose challenge for EU authorities
About 18,000 people demonstrated against mask-wearing in Berlin last month (Photo: Mike Maguire)
By ANDREW RETTMAN
BRUSSELS, 24. SEP, 07:08
The past four weeks have seen a flare-up in anti-mask and corona-denier protests in European cities.
There is a risk these will grow as EU states re-impose hygiene measures due to a second wave of infections – posing a danger to public order and health.
The coronavirus in close-up. Around 10,000 people held a protest in London, calling the pandemic a government hoax designed to undo democracy (Photo: Wikimedia)
Russia and China helped pave the way with disinformation campaigns.
But the trend is more complex than that, posing a challenge for EU regulators, who also need to protect rule of law and free speech.
Unusual times
About 18,000 people demonstrated against mask-wearing in Berlin on 29 August.
Around 10,000 people held similar protests in London the same day, calling the pandemic a government hoax designed to undo democracy.
And smaller rallies, ranging from fewer than 100 to some 1,000 people, have taken place in Brussels, Dublin, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Rotterdam, and Zurich in recent weeks.
They are being organised via Facebook groups, such as this Belgian one.
Calls to action are also circulating on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, for instance under the Dutch hashtag #ikdoenietmeermee [I Don’t Join Anymore], which was recently endorsed by three Dutch pop stars.
And the ideas behind them are being propagated by conspiracy-theory websites, such as stopworldcontrol.com, nomorefakenews.com, or rense.com.
Maybe some small, insignificant groups were protesting in Brussels, I don t even remember similar incidents, but in general we ve been behaving just like the government told us too, everybody wearing masks in supermarkets, crowded streets etc . I do admit though that the contact tracing was not very sophisticated, leaving your(?) name and telephone number in a bar or restaurant for example is not very reliable, and indeed, for privacy reasons, the app you mention could not officially be implimented.
How long have they been doing contact tracing??? Have enough people adapted the app to be useful?
September 30, 2020 11:58 am
Belgian authorities on Wednesday launched their contact tracing application Coronalert to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
The application alerts users if they have been in close contact with people who tested positive for the virus — much like similar apps that have been rolled out in France, Germany and many other European countries in past months.
The app was made available on Apple’s and Google’s app stores Wednesday. The application needs 15 percent of Belgians to sign up for it to provide first results, researcher and co-creator of the app Axel Legay told local media on Tuesday.
The Belgian app works according to the “decentralized” model, meaning data is not stored centrally by a government authority but rather kept in people’s phones for a period of 14 days. A group of European researchers advocated for this approach before the summer to limit the risks of privacy violations.
The applications were heralded as a key tool to fight the spread of the virus in the first months of the pandemic. But poor uptake by people wary of handing any of their information to governments and tech giants, combined with technical limits on functionality across borders, have hamstrung the efforts.
Previously from April, I find the following..
.On 6 April, we approached the Belgian government with concerns about the improper use of contact-tracing smartphone apps for controlling pandemics. These concerns were in line with those you discuss (Nature 580, 563; 2020). On 17 April, we drew its attention to other issues relating to lockdown exit strategies….
We argued that contact-tracing apps could complicate rather than facilitate lockdown exit (see go.nature.com/36ebfmq). For example, receiving (or not) a warning through the app might elicit a false sense of security, or drive demand for testing that might not be available. And there is more at stake than the government’s public-health-efforts and investment: an app’s success also depends on personal, public and social trust.
Governments need to engage stakeholders to co-design the app so that it aligns with local culture and connects with vulnerable populations. They also need to use proper information campaigns and human follow-up after issuing app warnings, and to ensure that the media accurately relay what the apps can and cannot deliver.
For now, the Belgian government has paused its implementation of contact-tracing apps (see go.nature.com/2zinmbb). If they pursue the project, we hope it will incorporate the necessary caution and guidance for citizens.
North Dakota told it’s citizens to do their own contact tracing about 3 weeks ago. That sure worked out well.
My brother-in-law died of it. At the funeral on Oct 24th 4 of 38 people in attendance wore a mask.
Can’t fix stupid, but COVID just may.
One of the links above didn’t work.
The UK is using a Test & Trace approach. It gets more difficult as the numbers rise.
link to gov.uk
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/?_ga=2.100465182.1438207599.1604790350-1492787937.1585422514&_gac=1.149016132.1604359171.CjwKCAiA-f78BRBbEiwATKRRBP5XBzHWQMRmziNS7wxqyJQruIhILwd_eYNMIjx4ILrZH54zbr0KzxoCIHAQAvD_BwE and-methodology/nhs-test-and-trace-statistics-england-methodology