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Comment by teachingassist | Hacker News Reader

Contact tracing is an sort of interesting solution

It works great when you have just a few cases and are highly motivated to stop them from spreading (Asia/Oceania)

and it doesn't work at all, when you have a lot of cases and have no interest in doing what's necessary to contain them (Americas/Europe)

Mass-market contact tracing, in hindsight, was completely pointless. I'm not personally aware of anyone who has been informed accurately of potential infection via a Bluetooth app.

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Are you sure? My take on why mass market contact tracing didn't pan out was that it was insufficiently implemented/used. If it were on every phone and on by default, perhaps even mandated, would it still not have worked? I know that many people take significant issue with that approach, but it would have made more of a difference, right?

There are a number of prerequisites, for this to work, that were not mandated in the US and Europe.

If someone is informed of a potential or likely infection, but then typically [chooses to/is able to] go about their day the same as usual, then what's the point of tracing them?

Initial modelling that showed contact tracing to potentially work assumed: 80% uptake, over 70s to be isolated in any case, and people to strictly follow isolation rules, none of which was considered politically possible in the West: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52294896

Yeah, a lot of it might not be politically or culturally possible. As far as I can tell, it was always technically possible to have very good automated contact tracing, though.

Adoption was by far the biggest problem. If Apple/Google just shipped it in the OS and made it opt out, I bet it would have had a significant impact. Not like turning the US into Australia, but even a 10% reduction in covid cases worldwide could have saved 300k lives.

I think in Germany it fails, because reporting positive tests fails. Nobody doubts, if the app was promoted and reporting working flawlessly, it would hugely contribute to managing the spread.

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