In Germany, the consensus is that indoor 15+ minutes is risky. So outdoor farmers market, beach, takeaway are all fine. But for supermarkets, everyone has to wear a mask to keep the air safe to breathe. Smear infection appears highly unlikely. So grocery shopping can be both risky or safe, depending on whether it's inside or outside and whether people wear masks or not.

Accordingly, most infections occur at private parties, in indoor restaurants, and in crowded factories, like meat processing plants.

This. I doubt the human capital required would make any financial sense for many companies. Digital contact tracing, on the other hand, is also a bust.

I wrote a 10 min post on it - https://tolusnotes.com/state-of-digital-contact-tracing-in-t...

Here in Oregon, the latest update was that they had fallen under the 95% benchmark for contact tracing. I don't know the details on what that 95% measures.

Also, they mentioned that while in the past, most case counts were from breakouts, that has changed. Now most case counts are "sporadic" cases, meaning no known infection source. The implication is that it's just out there in the general public now.

Oregon also currently has lousy test availability, at least as of a couple of days ago. One person I know seeking a test was basically denied - they couldn't even get scheduled. Something about too many tests being sent from Oregon to California and Arizona.

Transmission varies widely by individual. This preprint estimates that 10% of infected people cause 80% of infections. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-67 There's also plenty of research showing that the "three C's" are major factors: closed spaces, crowded places, and close contact. In fact if we could just cut down on the superspreading events, that might be enough to knock the average reproduction rate below 1. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/just-10-20-of-covid-...

Testing everyone every day seems unrealistic in the near term. New York's test latency is up to 7 days, which is already beyond the median time for symptoms to appear. Contact tracing would let potentially-affected people quarantine and wait for their test results while other people keep going out. Increasing the number of tests quickly would probably make the latency longer.

I want to quickly plug TWIV here. It is an incredible podcast. I have listened to it for several years, along with its sister podcasts, and have found it incredible useful as a professional scientists and also just for the wonderful stories. The science they discuss is always good.

During COVID they have really stepped up to provide clear and well grounded information to their listeners about the pandemic. Every friday they have been releasing an episode where a doctor on the front lines of the NY pandemic has given a medical update on symptoms and treatments. Invaluable information!

> The technology for fast pregnancy-test style tests for COVID-19 exists right now, and they could cost as little as $1 per test.

Antibody tests or antigen tests? I'm aware of that style of tests for the former but not the latter. You need the latter to do what you describe.

> People could, for instance, get tested each morning, and be required to present their daily test results upon arriving at work

I don't think test turnaround time is this quick in the U.S.

If your test has a 5% false positive rate, which is considered normal, then you'll be misdiagnosed as sick on average once per month. That seems not too helpful.

> You don't even need to contact trace if everyone gets tested every day

If you have a factory capable putting out 350M tests/day (let's not even get in to logistics or the next steps), please hang out your shingle.

If not, then perhaps considering plans within the realm of possibility is a better use of time.

> With a disease that has such uncertainty over its spread, its long term effects, and its recovery, I think it's silly to be certain about what will restore trust and how this will play out.

I see this comment a lot among friends and family, I call it ‘Blank-Checking’ because you can use it to basically shut down any argument, no questions asked.

A sample template that I believe would go a long way to restoring trust:

"Thursday in King County, contact tracers tracked cases from 301 of the 672 new cases identified Wednesday. They contacted and referred 5,000 people for quarantine and testing. Tuesday's contact tracing efforts identified 15% of the cases reported Wednesday, up from 5% a week ago. The number of contact tracers working in King County will expand from 300 to 1500 in the coming week.

We continue to see a high volume of cases associated with the Home Depot on Aurora, the Wallingford QFC, and UW's fraternity row. If you have been to any of these places within the last two weeks, we encourage you to seek testing immediately.

Testing is free, takes less than two minutes, and wait-times are less than ten minutes at most testing sites across Seattle. For more information, visit covid.seattle.gov or call 206-555-1212.

Your assistance is deeply appreciated. The sooner we can contact-trace every case, the sooner we can stop the COVID-19 outbreak and return to life as normal."

As daily reporting of this sort becomes part of the rhythm of life, it will both build trust and point the way for the community and government to reach to ~90%+ contact-tracing coverage. When full contact-tracing coverage is achieved, the case count can begin to drop rapidly.

This fight can be won. Winning saves lives.

Contact tracing is the way to allow individual citizens to accurately assess which jobs are risky.