"Contact tracing has helped Asian countries like South Korea and Singapore contain the spread of the virus, but their systems rely heavily on digital surveillance..."

"... using patients’ digital footprints to automatically alert their contacts, an intrusion that many Americans would not accept Massachusetts is opting for an old-school, labor-intensive method: people.... The idea of training a corps of contact tracers is emerging in many places at the same time, as leaders think ahead to the point when social distancing constraints will be lifted.... It is built around one-on-one telephone interviews of newly diagnosed patients and their contacts, so that subjects must answer the phone when it rings.... The downside of human contact tracing is that it is expensive, can overlook contacts a subject may not recall, and, some argue, is too slow for a fast-moving virus.... Within the next two hours, the case investigator will aim to reach the patient by phone and compile a list of every person he or she had been in close contact with for 48 hours before the onset of symptoms. The names of the contacts — the expectation is 10 people per new case — will then be passed to contact tracers, who will attempt to reach each one by telephone within 48 hours, calling back three times in succession to signal the call’s importance. For now, tracers are not leaving messages or call back numbers...."

From "An Army of Virus Tracers Takes Shape in Massachusetts/Asian countries have invested heavily in digital contact-tracing, which uses technology to warn people when they have been exposed to the coronavirus. Massachusetts is using an old-fashioned means: people" (NYT).

Reading the headline, I thought that article would be more of a pitch to go to digital surveillance, but it's promoting hiring huge numbers of contract tracers. Does that seem likely to work well in America? The Times doesn't come out and say it, but one might expect Americans to rankle at digital surveillance. The Times is politically correct enough not to lean heavily into the notion that surveillance is an "Asian" approach, but the implication seems to be there. The corollary is that the personal, individual connection is more suited to Americans.

But is it?! It's all about phone calls — phone calls from unknown numbers. Do we even answer the phone when we don't know the caller? I don't.  And what's your reaction when a call comes through without showing the caller's number — especially if they call back 3 times and never leave a message? I would never answer that call. Would you? Would the average American?

The article begins with an anecdote about a caller who not only gets the phone answered, but talks to a woman for 45 minutes. The 2 of them "giggled and commiserated." So... I'm sure some people pick up and love to talk to a stranger about their personal predicament. But I don't believe that's the way most of us Americans are using the phone these days.

The NYT should lay out the digital surveillance option and let us judge for ourselves whether it's superior to these hordes of human telephoners. If I'm protected from digital surveillance, then explain to me why the government that wants to call me on the telephone has my number? If you already can get to my number, then maybe when it's a matter of life and death, you should just go ahead and do the digital surveillance needed to trace the contagion and spare me the nonsense of a nice lady calling on the phone to giggle and commiserate with me for 45 minutes.

IN THE COMMENTS: I Have Misplaced My Pants identifies the worst flaw with the personal approach to contacts tracing:

Anyway, someone explain to me the point of focusing on contact tracing when we have been hiding from the general public for weeks now because the media has convinced people they’re going to Get It from a person standing too close at the ATM or touching packets of carrot seeds. Isn’t contact tracing related to the idea that the relevant risk is people you spent time around and know well enough to identify? If that’s the case and worth investing in as a technique, can we stop pretending that joggers and kids on playgrounds are a threat?

And MayBee said:

We obviously need a national program where government workers call random numbers and see if someone is so lonely they need to talk to a stranger for 45 minutes.

Well, jobs...

And Balfegor said:

I think part of why places like Singapore and Korea have been more comfortable with/resigned to mass surveillance in this case is that until quite recently, they were basically fascist dictatorships. More explicitly fascist in the case of Korea, but I think it's true of Singapore as well, and definitely true of Taiwan. Mass surveillance isn't some hypothetical future state -- it's the reality people grew up with. Sure it was relaxed somewhat over the past 20-30 years, but the infrastructure -- both practical and ideological -- has remained. Koreans have national ID cards, for example, but unlike a social security number in the US, they need their ID number for everything, even just signing up for free accounts on the internet (for which Korea has a "great firewall" of its own, though it's currently just used to block piracy and porn, without much effectiveness). If anything, what is new is the democratization of mass surveillance, with the private lives and movements of the infected exposed to public view (and ridicule), rather than being confined to the secret police, the way it used to be.

Anyhow, I think it's not "Asian" so much as a legacy of dictatorship. Japan, somewhat ironically given the key role of ex-Imperial officers in the authoritarian governments in Korea (Park Chunghee) and Taiwan (Lee Tenghui . . . Chiang Kaishek too, come to think of it), has struggled to implement similar mass surveillance mechanisms because they haven't had anything like that since 1945. Even use of cellphone data seems to have been a struggle. Despite the problems they are encountering tracking people who may have been exposed to hotspots in the red light districts (where people use fake names and pay cash), I don't think they've yet been able to access cellphone location data to track down everyone who went in and out of the potential hotspots. In Korea, meanwhile, they'd have pulled that data immediately and sent teams out to track people down and order them into confinement. In Japan, they've only just been able to start using anonymized location data to track activity levels following the request for voluntary restraint (自粛要請).