[CloudYeller]

The words "contact" and "tracing" didn't even appear once in the article. Are people outside of Asia not even considering test'n'trace as a possibility? Privacy concerns aside, it seems like an effective way to save lives without forcing everyone to stay home indefinitely.

[makomk]

Contact tracing is great for diseases like SARS and MERS, but it just doesn't seem to work adequately for this coronavirus Even Singapore is being forced to enact stricter and stricter lockdown measures. Also, you're not even going to get it to work as well as it did in Singapore unless the virus is coming from a known, external set of sources that allow you to narrow down the pool of potential cases.

(Public Health England in the UK had a fairly competent, though not totalitarian-level, contact tracing program. They stopped a while back because it became evident that despite their best efforts, the disease was becoming so widespread that it was reaching the limit of their contact tracing resources and most of the infections were probably unknown community spread that couldn't be found via contact tracing anyway. Other countries are likely similar.)

[SpicyLemonZest]

Contact tracing was happening at the start, and it'll presumably happen again once caseloads become manageable. As you'd expect with such a quickly moving story, coronavirus predictions have a huge splintering problem; most people writing about it don't have all the facts.

[lucideer]

Contact tracing is, as far as I've read, the very first strategy initiated by most Western governments and health organisations. In the early stages of reported cases.

As it stands, my country is still in relatively early stages compared to many others, and contact tracing became unviable as a first defence well over a week ago. Over 60% of our cases are community transmission.

We're still doing contact tracing, it's probably worthwhile, but it's not going to be a major factor in mitigation.

[CloudYeller]

What about contact tracing apps? Tracing won't work unless you know who was nearby each infected person. It's difficult to find that info unless a big portion of people are using a tracker app. Is that sort of thing happening where you are?

[lucideer]

It's been announced here (Ireland), though the official government contact-tracing app is as yet unreleased. It's believed to be a based on Singapore's BTLE one.

It's largely irrelevant though. As much as it may help a little, this just isn't manageable through contact tracing. While Singapore are being lauded for their CT approach, they've still largely been successful in their efforts due to social distancing (and a culture of widespread adherance), along with things like widespread testing, and effective govt. communication of data.

[danarmak]

It's happening here in Israel. The government is promoting an app which claims it stores the location history on-device and fetches known-disease-vector data from the server to compare it locally. (For good or bad it doesn't use the device's existing location history if it's already stored...)

They just announced it's had 1M installs (in a country of 8.7M) in the last week.

[ianai]

Is that the term for tracing and alerting people who were near people who positively test for covid-19? If so, it does seem to be done local to me, but probably not with the same rigorousness.