Kay Serrar wrote:
Amstel wrote:
Kay Serrar wrote:
Amstel wrote:
trail wrote:
Amstel wrote:
Contact tracing was never going to work in the U.S. Kay went on and on about testing and tracing being the key. The whole time I could not believe a fellow citizen thought this had any chance of success what so ever.
I know it worked in S. Korea and Hong Kong. We have a different society. How in the world would you contact trace the protesters and everyone they subsequently came in contact with? It is a total pipe dream.
I personally come in close contact with about 50 people a week and I don’t even own a cell phone. Now that sports leagues have resumed, I will come in contact with many more people than that.
You don't need a cell phone. That's just a tool. Contact tracing is really the most basic detective work.
African countries successfully used contact tracing against Ebola with just a minuscule fraction of the resources we have.
I can't accept this "oh we just can't do it here, it's too complicated!" line. African countries are doing it. New Zealand and most first-world countries are doing it. I can't really think of a good excuse why we're not.
I bet if you tried you could name a lot of people you were close to for more than 15 minutes. It doesn't have to be perfect. College try, buddy. At least get your close friends and family members on that list.
Ok answer me this. Let’s just take 1 day. There are 50,000 new cases. Let’s conservatively assume that each of these new cases had come in close contact with 10 people in the past week and those 500,000 people also came in contact with people. How many contact tracers do you recommend we hire for this one day of new cases?
You make a great point. Contact tracing is impractical with 50,000 cases per day.
The rest of your posts demonstrate how little you know about the subject.
Why don’t you enlighten me. Are you saying there is no need to contact/test the people that have been in close contact with the newly infected?
No, I said it was impractical with that many daily new cases.
It's relatively easy to model how many contact tracers you need for a given population size and number of new daily cases. And it can be done much more efficiently with the use of technology, which other countries are doing (but of course not us).
How does it work? Well, first we need to go into lock-down to isolate those infected and reduce the spread of the virus (we began to do this in March-April). Then follow the re-opening guidelines laid out by the epidemiologists (we all know how that went). Then set up sufficient numbers of contact tracers to go after any new pockets of infection (this could be done at a fraction of the total money we're throwing at the economy, if we re-opened per the guidelines). That way you keep the reproductive rate (R-naught) of the virus under 1.0 and stop it from getting out of control (this is what many other countries have now achieved).
Other countries are doing this. We aren't. Why not? Do we think we're so special that it's impossible for us to do what many other countries are doing? Unfortunately it turns out we ARE special. We're a bunch of dumbarses with fuckwits in charge.
All true.
1. As with every other measure that gets debated ad nauseum, it is one important tool among several. None is a silver bullet, each assists in proportion to the integrity of its use.
2. It is particularly useful once new infections are back under relative control. For us that was <20 per day. At >50,000 per day you'll strike some practical barriers. It is nonetheless
the key initiative to enable "reopening" (assuming reopening occurs 'once new infections are back under relative control.')
3. It uses a combination of tech (tracing app) and old fashioned manpower. It is working pretty well in Oz, where we are dealing with spikes in cases in about a dozen suburbs in Melbourne (about 70 a day).
The process starts with 'backward tracing' to work out from whom the subject was infected. What has impressed me lately is that there has been almost zero cases where they have not quickly identified the source of infection.
The next step is the 'forward tracing' where they identify and notify everyone who has had a relevant level of contact since the infection event. They are only looking for "close contact" of 15 minutes or more. In practice that has not been enormous groups of people. The worst offenders in Melbourne recently have been extended family get-togethers among migrant groups with possibly poor English and a cultural affinity for sharing meals with 4 generations of distant relatives in defiance of guidelines. From there it has spread to as many as 11 different households from a single event.
Under privacy rules there is no general notification to the public when someone is infected.
Again, in combination with other measures it seems to be effective, and critical to resolving localised outbreaks. We have a
total of 104 deaths nationally and aim to not let it go much higher. The idea of deliberately letting Covid spread throughout the nation, with the couple of hundred
thousand death count that would imply is not remotely under consideration.