OK, we need to stop discussing China and Chinas approach because we know they are lying about all of their numbers. That's what basically every Western country had said.

If you don't believe me, that's fine, just go Google it. US intelligence have publicly stated this. Just in the last few days the UK has stopped listing Chinese numbers at all because they as so badly wrong.

I don't doubt that there are a lot of personal anecdotes coming from China, but as far as I know the only numbers are the official ones and they are pap.

If you can offer factual evidence that that is not true, I'd be very pleased to be wrong since apparently Chinese coronavirus is 100 times less deadly than average...

So that brings us to contact tracing.

I'm happy to agree that contact tracing would mean we could keep R values lower with less disruption to people's lives. You could let people without contact go out more etc IF AND ONLY IF you can accurately do contact tracing.

But we've never done that before in the West. I belive it has been semi managed in Africa with Ebola. But Ebola is easier to test for. And its much faster to show symptoms. And patients tend to self isolate because they're so sick they can't get out of bed.

Coronavirus is airborne and seems to survive for long periods on surfaces. So you get many many more contacts even if you get fewer infections per contact.

The article doesn't attempt any maths despite these factors being key to knowing whether contact tracing works for a given disease. Do you know of any such model? Do we know what parameters we need to input for coronavirus (what defines a contact, how many contacts require quarantines etc)? I think these values are total unknowns for coronavirus, it's taken us this long to get to a semi reliable R0 value, we still don't know how R changed with quarantine methods and levels. So will we discover any of this in time to use it with COVID-19? Or will we just do the less accurate but just as effective measures we need to do and get through this in another 2-3 months?

Fyi, 0.6% (plus or minute 0.2percetage points) overall population fatality is what we are aiming for already based on having 100% treatment availability as far as I know. So apparently contact tracing offers exactly the same outcome? I have to ask again, what's the point? Isn't this at best a nice to have and at worse a wild goose chase?