Here’s the thing: when it comes to certain diseases and viruses, the government will track transmission. Things like syphilis, AIDS, gonorrhea, if someone has Ebolo or the bubonic plague, along with many others, Los Federales will look to see who they had contact with. If someone is spreading disease around, they lose their privacy rights because they are endangering other people. But, what about the government simply tracking all your movements? This is by Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Kelly Henning, who is director of public health at Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Why Contact Tracing Is an Essential Part of the Coronavirus Fight
We’ve been dealt a bad hand with the coronavirus pandemic. Until we have a vaccine or effective treatment, we have limited tools to fight it. Closing large segments of our society and having people shelter at home is a blunt tool that works, but it inflicts severe hardship on individuals and the economy.
We have a sharper tool, the four-cornered Box It In strategy, to stop chains of transmission by widespread testing, isolation of cases, contact tracing and quarantine of contacts. It works, but it doesn’t work perfectly. Some say it’s hopeless to even try contact tracing on this scale. But contact tracing can work — if we do it right. Some states, like New York, Massachusetts and California, are moving quickly to expand these services.
For many places right now, that’s correct. The numbers are overwhelming. But sheltering in place is working. We project that in New York City, perhaps the hardest-hit area of the world and still documenting more than a thousand new infections per day, the number of new cases will continue to decrease — if we continue to apply the blunt instrument and stay at home — to the low hundreds per day. Combined with an urgent and extensive scale-up of contact tracing capacity, we may be able to manage that number. For areas of the country and the world that haven’t yet experienced explosive spread, extensive contact tracing can help limit the need for widespread sheltering in place.
Wait a minute: if everyone is hunkered down by Government decree, why are there new cases? If people are washing their hands and practicing social distancing, why would they contract it? Something just doesn’t add up on the transmission of Bat Soup Virus.
Contact tracing won’t stop all spread of the coronavirus. But just because you can’t fix an entire problem doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix some of it. Every time contact tracing results in an infected person’s being isolated or a contact’s being quarantined when that person develops infection, a web of transmission is broken. The best evidence is that most people with the coronavirus don’t spread the infection at all, but a few spread it widely in superspreading events. These events are most devastating when they occur in congregate facilities that house medically vulnerable people — in particular, nursing homes, homeless shelters and correctional facilities. Contact tracing can quickly sound the alarm so that outbreaks can be either prevented or stopped early, limiting disease spread both within and outside these places.
Wait, most people do not spread it at all? Isn’t that a rather important bit of information to know? First I’ve heard of it.
Newer technologies may help increase the efficiency and effectiveness, but person-to-person interaction will always be required. For example, technologies that help contact tracers communicate with patients and contacts and allow contacts to report their status and seek assistance can make the process more efficient. In contrast, ambitious efforts to detect contacts automatically by tracking Bluetooth connections are unproven, raise important privacy concerns and will be limited by the proportion of people participating, although they could potentially be important to contact tracing in the future.
It’s nice that they don’t want people tracked by Bluetooth, but, that’s not how the government is trying to track people: it’s by the location of their phone to the cell tower. And with doctors recommending all this contact tracing, this will involve massive amounts of government intervention, and they will go to the easiest, tracing where your phone was. Turning your GPS doesn’t help. And once they start doing this, when do they stop? They’ve already set the stage that we could see another big outbreak come Fall. So, they’ll keep the program going. And they will use it for more and more things, all in the name of “public safety.” Enjoying your test drive of Modern Socialism?
Read: NY Times Recommends Contact Tracing To Help Stop Bat Soup Virus »
The coronavirus has killed so many people in Iran that the country has resorted to mass burials, but in neighboring Iraq, the body count is fewer than 100.
Working from home may not be better for the environment in the long-term as it could be offset by emissions in the home and additional car journeys, according to a study from the University of Sussex.
My first reaction to the comparison between the climate crisis and the pandemic: We cannot shelter in place for climate. Yet, symptoms are known. The physical repercussions of climate risk are very visible. So is the science. Regretfully, no vaccines nor tests would help in reversing climate change.
