Hacker News Reader

Comment by danhak | Hacker News Reader

That's absolutely not true. Contact tracing is a thing. Most of the restaurants I've patronized in L.A. this year required a contact name / number before being seated for tracing purposes.

View on HN

Contact tracing can work and NZ has had success, mostly meeting its “80% traced in 3 days” target. However the system cost is something like NZ$70m and can handle up to 1000 cases daily. Doing this for 225k cases per day seems almost insurmountable from way down here.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/122433365/... https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/oversight-contact-tracin...

I'm in the Bay Area and I have never been asked for contact info for outdoor dining. Apparently restaurants are supposed to ask people who dine indoors.

I've dined outdoors at about 10 different restaurants in the past couple months, but only one has asked for contact details (they just immediately entered me into their reservations app). So agree that this does not seem to be a widespread practice.

After the initial outbreak we never got low enough in LA for tracing to actually be useful.

Which only tells you who was there at any given time. And I doubt that data is correct, we had multiple cases where people lied on the forms. And then you still don't know where they caught it. It only tells officials who to call. They is always a huge margin of error. And that is when contact tracing is working at scale. German authorities basically gave up on it because there are too many cases.

That's insane. Here in Nashville, TN I have NEVER been required to give my personal information to visit to a restaurant or bar. At what point do the people of California start to wake up about big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control? I am so happy I left San Francisco in 2018.

Utah bars scan the dotcode on dyrovers licenses, so even if you are just there for music or friends, a record might be kept. That was well before 2020.

Utah loves laws that hassle drinkers, because they're a bunch of Mormons.

From outside the US, this attitude is impossible to understand when there's 9/11 worth of horrible, miserable, lonely deaths each and every day.

It's so strange. After 9/11, Americans completely remade their society and started a series of pointless, losing wars. But COVID has killed a hundred times as many, seriously injured god knows how many more, and people just go on about "big brother, destruction of freedoms, and government control".

That's what's "insane" to me - a major, deadly pandemic that the world's richest country refuses to deal with due to clinical paranoia.

Calm down. It's BS, LA resident never even been asked for info.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com