Contact Tracers hard at work (live, best, business)

[CA4Now]

Contact tracing is of limited effectiveness if people have to wait 5 to 6 days for results of their tests.

[joosoon]

Good article about why CT has worked in Asia. The tl;dr is that the concept of privacy is culturally different than in the west, particularly the U.S., and voluntary compliance (or being voluntold to do it) is met with much easier.

Drawing on the experience of countries that are effectively using technology for contact tracing, the first step — and a requirement — is to encourage, or, better yet, mandate, the installation of tracking apps on phones. In East Asian countries, this has been more mandatory than voluntary. In Singapore, a country known for its efficiency and no-nonsense government, citizens are encouraged by the government to install TraceTogether, which exchanges Bluetooth signals between mobile phones in close proximity. This is a modern counterpart to the traditional and time-consuming contact-tracing method, which relies on fallible human memory.

[looker009]

Originally Posted by joosoon

Good article about why CT has worked in Asia. The tl;dr is that the concept of privacy is culturally different than in the west, particularly the U.S., and voluntary compliance (or being voluntold to do it) is met with much easier.

It will never happen in US. Public will not put up with it.

[CA4Now]

Establishing exactly where a person may have been exposed has proved to be a significant challenge, particularly once residents started intermingling more as businesses and public spaces reopened, according to Dr. Clayton Chau, director of the Orange County Health Care Agency and acting county health officer.

“It’s quite difficult, even the person themself would not know,” he said during a briefing Thursday. “‘Well, I was at the bar; I was at the beach; I was here; I was there, where did I get infected?’ It’s a very difficult question to decipher, and all case investigators and tracers do their best to try to ask people, ‘Where were you at so we can pinpoint?’ But, as far as I know, we can’t really pinpoint.”

https://www.latimes.com/california/s...s-of-infection

[RMESMH]

Originally Posted by HereOnMars

Wait. What?

Beat me to it.

[CA4Now]

Contact tracing has largely been abandoned by public health departments — infrastructure does not exist and has not been developed to implement a comprehensive tracing program. Further, contact tracing has been hindered by poorly available testing — when it has been available, the results have taken too long to come back, making an effective contact tracing strategy impossible.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...elines-testing

[looker009]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

Contact tracing has largely been abandoned by public health departments — infrastructure does not exist and has not been developed to implement a comprehensive tracing program. Further, contact tracing has been hindered by poorly available testing — when it has been available, the results have taken too long to come back, making an effective contact tracing strategy impossible.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...elines-testing

Public tracing was never going to work in US. Unlike other countries we value our privacy extremely high and are not willing to give it up even during pandemic. There was never even attempt to have the public use tracking app which would make contact tracking much easier. The next issue will be vaccine which majority of US public will refuse to get.

[CA4Now]

Contact tracing...was supposed to get us out of the pandemic. It’s meant to work like this: Let’s say Aunt Sally tests positive for COVID-19. A tracer working for the local public-health department calls her and asks for her contacts—anyone she’s spent more than 15 minutes with recently—and asks her to self-isolate. Then the tracer calls those “close contacts” of Aunt Sally’s, and asks them to self-isolate too. The tracer doesn’t tell Aunt Sally’s contacts that she is the person who tested positive, only that someone they were in contact with did.

In the United States, this whole process is failing, allowing Aunt Sally to continue roaming about town, infecting others and spreading COVID-19. There is no national contact-tracing program in the U.S., and contact tracers who work for the 40 local health departments in areas with the most coronavirus cases have reached just a fraction of the patients who have tested positive, a Reuters investigation found earlier this month. In Maryland, 25 percent of those called by contact tracers don’t pick up. At one point in Miami, contact tracers were able to reach only 17 percent of the infected. In Houston, New Jersey, and California’s Inland Empire, half of the people reached by contact tracers won’t cooperate.

Contact tracers are not to blame. Tracers tend to be relatively low-paid, civic-minded workers who make calls relentlessly in an attempt to rescue the nation from a ruthless pandemic. But they’re struggling for three main reasons.

There Are Too Many Cases to Track
Testing Takes Too Long
Many Americans Fear and Distrust Government

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ing-us/615637/

[1AngryTaxPayer]

Originally Posted by looker009

It takers much longer than few days for someone to have gotten sick from that party. However that is fair point. With that being said, i asked multiple people and have so far and not found anyone that been tested sick. Sure they can be lying which is always the possibility. Even if i were to have gotten sick now from the party, it would still be negative for covid if i took the test today. If they really wanted corporation, telling who gave them the phone number might change some people mind in talking with them.

If like me, you can have it and not have any symptoms. My entire family had it and my son is the only one we'd even guess was sick as he lost 15 lbs and a nasty cough for about a week. My wife's boss is near 80 and showed no symptoms.

But, Govt would never over reach and use data it wasn't intended for? Ya right.

[DriveNotCommute]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

Contact tracing has largely been abandoned by public health departments — infrastructure does not exist and has not been developed to implement a comprehensive tracing program. Further, contact tracing has been hindered by poorly available testing — when it has been available, the results have taken too long to come back, making an effective contact tracing strategy impossible.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...elines-testing

Originally Posted by looker009

Public tracing was never going to work in US. Unlike other countries we value our privacy extremely high and are not willing to give it up even during pandemic. There was never even attempt to have the public use tracking app which would make contact tracking much easier. The next issue will be vaccine which majority of US public will refuse to get.

But people love giving their privacy to Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Tinder, and whatever social media du-jour is out there.

I guess epidemiologists can try making an app too, one that adds features for empowering users to push their egos across the Internet through shaky videos and low-quality sound recording. Then one lousy app later this country will have that contacting tracing infrastructure that we're missing now.