Are you asking for evidence that knowing everyone’s locations and travel itineraries would assist in contact tracing? Because I think that one is obvious.
Otherwise, I’m not particularly interested in having a COVID conversation.
Otherwise, I’m not particularly interested in having a COVID conversation.
And again, even tracing infectious contacts was much easier with mass tracking of every single citizens location, that still doesn't mean it is actually useful to stop a pandemic. It might be! Which is why I was asking for good evidence.
You're arguing against ghosts. That is not what I said, or even implied. I wrote:
> It is evident that having knowledge of individuals' travel destinations would undoubtedly assist in contact tracing efforts.
Tracking movement is obviously helpful for contact tracing, because you can track the proximity of individuals to each other and warn those who were near a confirmed case.
I wrote absolutely nothing on whether contact tracing is impactful, and I wrote nothing about whether you could accomplish the same result in a different way. The usefulness of contract tracing is not a conversation I wish to engage in.
You keep repeating that it is obvious and again, saying that something is just... obvious is not enough when discussing dangerous, almost "dual use" methods like contact tracing using mass tracking.
You'll have to ask the Chinese CDC, I'm sure they have an answer for you much like our own CDCs do.
It's usually some combination of time and distance proximity to a confirmed COVID case.
The only difference with COVID was the scale, not the methodology. There is an argument that if the disease is everywhere, people can be infected anywhere, and you would need an accordingly exponential increase in monitoring scale to pull any kind of signal from the noise floor. But the principles work for any disease.
source: TB control physician for 17 years
And agreed also that my point is probably more true for COVID than anything else. The scale of COVID is such that it automatically requires mass tracking to even consider contact tracing, but I guess my argument was that even then we should have evidence that such massive tracking improves contact tracing for very infectious viruses like COVID.
I'm genuinely asking, not in a "just asking questions" manner here. So thanks for replying! I didn't know contact tracing was useful for TB too.
What we did have was public health which sometimes managed to call people after a positive result - to warn their contacts, so they don't infect others in turn. This is absolutely standard for public health for many illnesses, and helps reduce contagion.
Neither of those is mass tracking. Public health doesn't report you if you went to see prostitutes or used illegal drugs; their job is to stop chains of transmission, and contact the people you were around. That's true for TB as mentioned, as well as smallpox, Ebola, etc
Anyways, since you're in Québec you might be interested in this figure, selecting the 0-49 demographic. Public health isn't telling us about this, or simple methods to reduce risk. Hell, HEPA filters are still near impossible to install in schools.
https://statistique.quebec.ca/fr/document/surmortalite-hebdo...
This is the story I was referring to: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadians-trips-to-liquor-stor...
And I totally agree about your last point. I'll add a more controversial opinion that our Public health authorities have been completely politicised here. Legault does not want to talk about COVID anymore so we don't. And when it was scoring points politically, they blatantly played with facts and timelines to make political decisions sound "based on science". Very very disappointed about how our public institutions acted during the crisis. For example, that the crazy, criminal, stuff that happened in CHSLDs early on was completely swept under the rug with no government official suffering from any meaningful consequences was... Eye opening.
My understanding (my mother is a doctor) is that we do try to do contact tracing for STDs, but this relies on patients' self-report of who they've been in contact with recently.
The entire effort, using essentially every technology applied, was useless.
It was for many reasons, but primarily because the asymptomatic rate was very, very high, that there was no way to actually trace anything. Where or who you got Covid from was pure speculation for a majority of positive cases.
Scales and rates matter. With TB you have a very high fidelity, testable, slow spreading causal chain. Which is why TB tracing programs are effective, and good public health policy.
Our national Covid policies were ineffective, to say the least.
> The only difference with
> COVID was the scale, not
> the methodology.
Because you only need one, and the R0 is so high, missing animals is a huge hole in tracking.
That wasn't my question.
> Because you only need one, and the R0 is so high, missing animals is a huge hole in tracking.
You only "need one" for what? To infect a person? Obviously if you don't track animal to human contacts you will miss an animal to human contact if an animal to human infection occurred. But there are thousands of infections per day. Contact tracing is unlikely to be 100% reliable over all cases. So what do you "only need one" for? To increase case load by one? I genuinely don't know what you're trying to get at.
If over all of Corona let's say 10 people got infected by animals, and you miss them. What happens then?
Should we also track rock to human infections? Maybe they could happen, and we only need to miss one...
Ok, I don’t think it’s obvious so let’s have that conversation. Do you have any examples you can share where contact tracing lead to less restrictions compared to another area that did not engage in contact tracing? My intuition is that no such example can be proven, which relegates contract tracing to nothing more than a faithkeeping exercise.
I recommend thoroughly reviewing what I wrote that you quoted, and then contemplating the relevance of your question to the topic at hand.
If it helps, the effectiveness of contact tracing is not relevant to the discussion.