Is there still evidence for this type of contact tracing? Was it ever even shown to work or reduce infection?
It seems now we should just be focusing on vaccinating everyone. Everything else is just noise at this point or political virtue signaling.
For example, for ~3 months we had:
- 1 person could go grocery shopping once per day for 1 hour
- you could only go outside for a maximum of 1 hour per day for excervise only
- every single organisation (other than critical care locations) had their physical locations shut down
- everyone was mandated to wear masks outside of their residence
And a bunch more...
We had ~5 community cases identified in Brisbane recently and the entire city went into an instant hard lockdown for 3 days whilst contact tracers worked out the scale of the issue.
It has nothing to do with how many cases we have, but everything to do with how harshly and rapidly we prevent community interaction.
The drastic difference in outcome so far compared to Australia boils down to just a few differences, as far as I can tell:
* we never truly closed the border. We should probably have tried harder, but it is impossible to strictly do so with the USA, at least. The majority of cases in last March and April were from American visitors, and locals who had travelled there. Those seeds of outbreak seem to still be the main strain circulating now.
* our lockdowns were not quite as strict, or strictly enforced, and were more haphazard for when they were applied and when they were loosened
* testing was not deployed as rapidly or widely
* contact tracing becomes less and less feasible with the more cases there are, and past a tipping point it becomes hopeless to expect it will actually contain it (though they certainly still try)
"Australia has done better than other countries" is correlation. Is it causation?
I'm not sure what you mean by "this type". What you've quoted is how contact tracing works. It does work, see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4