[T]he first statistics from the program, which began on June 1, indicate that tracers are often unable to locate infected people or gather information from them. Only 35 percent of the 5,347 city residents who tested positive or were presumed positive for Covid-19 in the program’s first two weeks gave information about close contacts to tracers, the city said in releasing the first statistics....Are privacy concerns also the reason why the response rate on the telephone calls is so low? The article doesn't get into that, but I'd like to know what is happening in those phone calls. Are people resisting the intrusion or is there some other reason why so few "gave information about close contacts"? Did they refuse to talk at all? Did they answer the phone? (I know I don't answer the phone if I don't know who's calling.) Or did they simply not know the names of the people they'd been in contact with? You can't fix a problem if you don't know what it is.
Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, which is guiding an effort to bring on thousands of tracers in New Jersey, called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said....
An increasing number of countries are using phone applications to help track and trace people who test positive. Several states in the United States, including North Dakota, that have tried using digital applications have run into privacy issues. But in New York, as in most of the country, contact tracers are typically using only low-tech tools like phone calls and a questionnaire, in part to allay privacy concerns....
June 21, 2020
The coronavirus contact-tracing program in NYC isn't working too well, but why not?
I'm reading "N.Y.C. Hired 3,000 Workers for Contact Tracing. It’s Not Going Well/The program is crucial to the next phase of reopening, which begins on Monday. But workers have not had much success in getting information from people who test positive" (NYT):
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You can't fix a problem if you don't know what it is.
That can be a problem.
Now- consider people's responses to calls from political pollsters.
And now you know why many of us give so little credence to polls. Contact tracing by phone is not going to work.
Good points, all.
I know that if I were to answer the phone for a random phone call, I would not tell them where I'd been or who I'd been with just because they *claimed* to be a contact tracer.
It's a huge privacy issue for one. I don't know if they are legit or not, just because that's who they say they are.
What if I've gone somewhere I wasn't "supposed" to go? Am I going to admit that?
What happens to the people who are at that place? Let's say....I go to my little local yarn store. Are they going to all have to get tested? Get shut down? I don't want them shut down because of me! If I caused a problem, they'll know it soon enough, because they'll get sick.
Or what if I went to a big protest? Do you think I'm going to admit I got COVID at my beloved protest? Or let my political opponents use my COVID to shut down the protests?
Are we even seeing proof that COVID is so dangerous we need contact tracers?
Finally, remember when Gretchen WItmer hired her Dem campaign human datatbase company to do contact tracing right at the very beginning of the outbreak? I do! What are they going to use my information for? Even now, if that's how they started this whole thing off?
They really want people to give the government information on who they have been in close contact with? Would you trust the Democrats with that information?
The Jews have obvious reasons to avoid participating.
The entire COVID 19 exercise has been an obvious sham and power grab from the start.
Maybe the tracing is failing for the same reasons that businesses are resorting to plywood instead of glass?
The Democrats doing the contact tracing are sending armed thugs out at night.
I would expect participation to be spotty.
I think it is really cute at this point watching the panick mongers cling to their belief that COVID-19 is going to kill us all at this point.
Glutenmorgen mein dummkopfs
I don't have enough spare brain cells to spare to look into this nightmare but if I was given this project I would look to the democratic Asian countries to find out how they're doing it. It's very successful in South Korea. Not perfect but good enough. Leaving it to academics they always like reinventing the wheel, in my experience.
COVID-19 outbreak at Cruisin’ Chubbys strip club in Wisconsin Dells
Were you in Cruisin’ Chubbys strip club between June 10 and 14?
Bad news!
Make sure you call Perry N. Halkitis, Dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, and give names of anyone you came in contact with, and addresses, if you have them.
Althouse--you lived in NYC. What do you think the problem is?
You can't fix a problem if you don't know what it is.
De Blasio has instructed the tracers they are forbidden to ask if anyone had been at a protest recently. The party of science my ass.
My husband and I were talking about COVID yesterday. He's a Dem, and you all know me. We both have public-facing jobs, so we're both pretty good with the masks and the hand sanitizer and the not standing close to people we don't live with.
But neither of us are really afraid of the illness itself. Not more than other illnesses. We're afraid of everything that goes along with it. If we got it, we'd have to tell our clients. I'd have to tell my boss. He'd maybe have to tell all of his clients, after he's struggled so hard to remain in business through the lockdowns. It would be a huge disaster.
So there is a lot of incentive for normal people to just not get tested, or not admit it if they have it. Treat it more like the flu or pneumonia. I'm sick and I'm not coming into work. Not put out an APB. Why would you subject someone else to that?
"I don't have enough spare brain cells..."
Howard never spoke truer words. And it isn't going to get better, either.
How have past "tracing" programs worked with the common cold virus, flu virus or HIV?
I ask that rhetorically of course, since nobody was stupid enough to even suggest tracing programs for these viruses.
Here are the important figures: roughly 400k infected in a state of 19 million, with its biggest city with a population of 8 million. Tracing made sense when there were a handful of infections back in maybe February. It doesn’t make sense at this point in a state with 8 million people packed into one city. Tracing STDs makes sense, because most people know whom they have had sex with, or at least kinda know. COVID-19 is airborne. It very much appears that it has been passed on the NYC subways. Do you list each person you shared a subway car with? If it can pass on the streets, it would be on the streets of Manhattan. Do you list everyone you walked by there? The false negatives and false positives are guaranteed to swamp the process in places like NY.
Short answer - it is idiotic.
“ Were you in Cruisin’ Chubbys strip club between June 10 and 14”
“Make sure you call Perry N. Halkitis, Dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, and give names of anyone you came in contact with, and addresses, if you have them”
Great. Dancers never use their real names, and patrons often don’t.
First, the "contact tracers" were instructed not to contact people in "protests," rioters.
Because they can't ask them if they were part of the riots??? https://www.thecity.nyc/coronavirus/2020/6/14/21290963/nyc-covid-19-trackers-skipping-floyd-protest-questions-even-amid-fears-of-new-wave
Hmm.... couldn't have anything to do with the left's previous attitude about contact tracing, regarding the AIDs epidemic? Unintended consequences and all that.....
If you got a random phone call from an unknown phone number, would you
a) not answer, because like most people you don't answer random phone calls because they are usually trying to sell you something or donate to some cause;
b) truthfully disclose your when/where/who contacts; or
c) give them a detailed list of your enemies.
I vote for c).
"Are we even seeing proof that COVID is so dangerous we need contact tracers?"
In addition to this, contact tracing itself is of far less value in a fairly-contagious disease spread by aerosol droplets. Compare this scenario to STD's where the disease itself requires very close personal contact to spread. (Depending on your particular lifestyle, you still might not know the *name(s)* of your individual contact(s), But at least it won't be "17 people you spent 10 minutes with crammed into a subway car"--so again that might very with your individual lifestyle.)
Well, voluntary contact tracing isn’t working, so Dems have NO CHOICE but to make it mandatory. If it saves even one life!
Amadeus, I live in NYC and I, like Ann, don’t answer the phone if I don’t know who’s calling, so there’s that. Also, I have a friend who applied for a contact tracing job and who didn’t get picked—she didn’t even get a response to her application. She’s well educated, smart, and responsible, and she would have done an excellent job. (She’s also desperate for money.) Given Deblasio’s propensity for hiring the incompetent (e.g. his wife), my bet is that he hired 3000 idiots.
There are 3000 people assigned to track an average of 400 people per day who test positive.
Why isn't it a violation of HIPAA privacy rules to disclose people who tested positive for ChineseBatLabCooties to other people?
Because big fat public health emergency? An emergency that's not as bad as systemic racism?
Maybe they should start tracking people who have contracted systemic racism.
Option A: X number of people get sick, Y% of them die, economy dies, depression, society devolves into chaos. End of Western Civilization.
Option B: Open the economy, society recovers from this suicide gesture. ~X get sick, ~Y% die (approximately same numbers as Option A). Life goes on.
It's becoming increasingly clear that those are our 2 options.
Option C- kick the can down the road with shutdowns until Science comes up with a vaccine or truly effective treatment- took itself out of the running a couple of weeks ago when 1200 Sciencers signed the letter saying that it's OK to spread the virus if you're bothered by racism. Option C = Option A.
South Korea is a high-trust society. The United States is not.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ....
Agree with what everyone has said. We don't answer the phone when a strange number calls. And even if we did, we're not going to give out private information to a stranger. How would I know you're REALLY from the Health Dept? Why should I give out my personal information?
The CV-19 thing is over. The media can keep expressing CONCERN (until we get more left-wing riots) but I've done my bit. Lets protect the old people, maintain the social distancing, work on the vaccine, re-open and move on.
SK and Japan are high trust societies because they are NOT diverse. All that crap about "Diversity is our biggest strength" is just a lie people tell themselves because they have to.
"I think it is really cute at this point watching the panick mongers cling to their belief that COVID-19 is going to kill us all at this point."
Some baseball players and employees have tested positive, and a baseball site I look at is going, "We'll never get games in this year...maybe next year, too." It's like an infinite learning curve since they were welding people's doors shut in China.
"You can't fix a problem if you don't know what it is."
Progs can. Example: systemic racism.
"Lets protect the old people"
Yes, let's. Don't isolate them in old people's homes. Don't cut them off from their families and then spread diseases among them. Don't shut them away from the sun. Don't close hospital-based gymns that are helping the oldest safely maintain strength and independence. Do not vote for serial Mom and Pop killers like DeBlasio.
If they had surveyed 50 people before they designed this plan, they'd have known it would not work. But experts gotta be experts.
Some strange phone number shows up on my ringing phone and I won't answer. Which is why I didn't answer when the County called to give me my test results (they didn't ask for email addresses at the time of the test).
Some stranger calls even if I do answer and starts asking a bunch of questions about my private life, I'm likely not to answer. I don't know that you are who you say you are.
Look -- the real point of this "contract tracing" requirement is to give the government the built-in excuse to not reopen further.
Everything about this program is designed to fail at contact tracing.
But deblasio gets to pay 3000 cronies taxpayer money for a while.
They can hunt down a few more Jews and lock up their schools while they are at it.
But do not ask about the protests while hunting down Jews.
What everyone else said plus, in NYC lots of people with no to minimum english.If they do answer the phone and the person is not speaking in their native tongue - click.
Contract tracing could be used to forcibly quarantine the exposed.
If this was a serious disease and not just the common cold
that is what we'd do
I'm Full of Soup: "If they had surveyed 50 people before they designed this plan, they'd have known it would not work. But experts gotta be experts."
Inga and Howard will be along shortly to explain how deplorable hawaiian shirt wearing wreckers are sabotaging another "brilliant" lefty policy.
Inga will probably provide links to stories that mysterious white supremacists were seen in the areas of failed tracing actions. I wouldnt be surprised if they report "nooses" and "swastikas" were seen as well.
I mean, why not, right?
All the public health departments need to do is include compliance with contact tracers as part of the social credit score. Problem solved!
Inasmuch as the "tracers" were instructed to not ask or mention the "protests" gotta feel it's just more prog kabuki theater.
De Blasio is a joke. A bad joke but a joke nevertheless. NYC deserves every bit of pain its suffering. As Obama was fond of saying "elections have consequences". Nevertheless the Marching Morons there will vote for more in November.
Contact tracing is effective when you have less than a thousand cases and ineffective when you have well more than a million.
Please tell me what the CDC has been doing for the past twenty years. It could have been studying and emulating Hong Kong's rapid virus response protocols. Instead it was fighting structural racism.
are we still flattening the curve?
what is the point of contact tracing? >>
other than pretend epidemiology by potentiating political-legal jeopardy
"You can't fix a problem if you don't know what it is."
Sometimes you can, if you know where it is.
But the program did transfer some substantial amount of public funds to some unemployed Democrats, so it can't be said to have failed. They just didn't devote enough resources to it. I expect it will still be going strong in 2030, with tens or thousands of Democrats working as tracers. God only knows what they'll be tracing in 2030, but they'll think of something.
alex berenson points out the latest kerfluffle is much about nothing,
I saw a meme a couple of weeks ago that went thus:
"Here's how contact tracing will work --
An unknown number calls.
Person blocks it as spam.
Unknown text is received.
Person blocks it as spam also.
Contact tracer finally gets through 3 days later.
Person says he's been in contact with people he doesn't like so as to get them quarantined, but forgets to mention Kathy in accounting who he's having an affair with.
And yeah, that's about it."
oh and the vaunted social distancing protocols, don't particularly work to mitigate the outbreak,
Can't read due to paywall. I'm sure there's a way to get around the phone issue etc. Bigger issue is that no one wants to say I was with so and so and cause them to have to quarantine etc. People see a lot of downside to it. As an example , when schools re open, if someone tests positive and says they were at the school, now the school will need to shuttered for some indeterminate amount of time. And on and on
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