[scarmig]

> There are a billion+ people

> simply not enough personnel to do any contact tracing.

Those seem a bit contradictory, no? China also has over a billion people and managed to find the labor to perform contact tracing.

[toomanybeersies]

China is already a surveillance state though, so it's not really a good example.

[ateevchopra]

China has made QR readers checkpoints across city to track people's each and every movement.

[scarmig]

When the pandemic started, they hired thousands of people to do the old-fashioned, labor intensive version of contact tracing. Technology and preexisting state powers certainly played a part, but the manual contact tracing is very transferrable everywhere.

[quantummkv]

China is already a police that tracks every bit of data on their part of the internet. They don't need manual labor or new apps for contact tracing because they already had the infrastructure built.