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Comment by TomVDB | Hacker News Reader

“Anywhere” as in “the western world”?

Because contact tracing seems to work very well at scale in Asia.

I would say most specifically in the US.

It's a cultural thing. Asian cultures vary dramatically between each other (don't mistake Koreans, Chinese, or Japanese for each other -it won't end well), but they have one thing in common: They have a real sense of every person is part of a collective. Maybe it's because most Asian societies are quite crowded.

The US, on the other hand, has a real sense of everyone is an individual, to the point of actually considering people that follow rules and norms to be "sheeple" (see "antimaskers").

Europeans seem to be in the middle.

In the UK, and England specifically, another factor is ideology - vast amounts of money have been spent on outsourcing contact tracing even though the statistics suggest the result performance isn't very good. Meanwhile, local government run contact tracing has been really effective but seems to be starved of resources because they are public sector and therefore, apparently, must be bad at what they do.

Those comparisons are misleaidng and themselves the result of ideology - the local contact tracing and national contact tracing have different success rates in large part because they handle different kinds of contacts. Local contact tracing handles "complex" cases, which are generally things like workplace outbreaks where they have the help of employee records and attendance lists. National contact tracing handles all the other, less robustly recorded social contacts. I believe that in Canada, where all contact tracing is local, a lot of areas have recently abandoned tracing the kinds of contacts that are handled by the UK's national scheme altogether because they don't have the resources and it doesn't work well.

I found this informative. It is often the details that make the difference.

Contact tracing should not be the the responsibility of the individual, it should be the responsibility of the government (with cooperation of the individual of course). This is how Asian countries have succeeded at it. The US isn't even trying yet - I still don't think I can even get a rapid test where I live.

It isn't just cultural, it is also genetic.

The 5-HTR1A gene affects whether we more easily make relative versus absolute judgments. And this seems to be true for everything from the length of lines, to quality of life. The allele that is most common in East Asia makes relative judgements easier, in America it is absolute judgements that are easier.

Politically, having the relative form of the gene encourages more community thinking while the absolute encourages more individualism. This leaning holds within whatever society you're in. But when a culture is dominated by one form of the gene, it will naturally shift the entire society.

I learned this from pages 183-186 of https://www.amazon.com/Whos-Charge-Free-Science-Brain/dp/006... and I've wondered ever since how many of my opinions are reason (as it feels) versus genetics.

Scanning the Wikipedia page for 5-HTR1A, it looks like most of the studies were done in the first decade of the 21st century, when the candidate gene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidate_gene#Criticisms) approach was at its height, before it became known that many of these studies were statistically underpowered and thus likely detecting noise. So I'd be skeptical of any associations between 5-HTR1A and personality unless there's been recent follow-up.

Spot on

That would make sense given that the book I read was from 2012. Thanks for the correction!

China is a full blown police state.

Did it work at scale, or did it work because it was employed early enough (along with other strict measures) that it didn't have to scale much? The latter is my understanding.

Luck of choice, human rights, data protection and privacy, collectivist society and strong government enforcement bodies are prerequisites for a successful contact tracing. I guess that work much better in Asia than in the "western world".

Yes, because Korea, Taiwan, and Australia can all be defined by lack of human rights and a collectivist society.

And yet, just like China, they have also beaten the virus. Meanwhile, Russia has failed on all counts.

The West has the laws on the books, and the legal precedent necessary to enforce them, when it comes to epidemics. What it lacks is the political will.

It doesn't matter how effective these measures are, or how bad an idea it is to let the virus run unchecked - under it's current leadership, states like Kentucky will never do what is necessary to get the virus under control, because these measures are anathema to it's current regime. And states like Washington won't either, because while those measures are not anathema to them, their governments are afraid of a backlash that will replace them.

This wasn't an inevitable outcome - nothing fundamentally stopped bipartisan cooperation on this point. Political expedience and the desire to own the libs did. Had the right not used the pandemic as an opportunity to grab power, and start a culture war, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Just a nitpick, but Russia isn't a collectivist society. It's very individualistic in many ways since 1993.

Don't be partisan. The democrats pulled shenanigans too, like tacking on random stuff about green energy and international trade on the covid relief bill.

A Covid relief bill is not sufficient, or even necessary to stop Covid. Quarantine, lockdown, and widespread testing is. The bill just deals with some of the financial fallout.

And you can't blame the Democrats for choosing to make resistance to following best practices in disease control a wedge issue.

Don't equate the damage caused by 'a relief bill didn't pass because two parties couldn't agree on which pork could be added to it' and 'one of the parties is not following basic epidemic control practices'.

The financial aid is required in order to get public support for the lockdown.

Sweden squashed their cases down from a massive peak without any lockdowns or masks, but with a social welfare system that supported anyone who felt even slightly sick to stay home

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