[zhdc1]

When you lack resources, you're much better off taking an extreme approach early on to stop the spread and then following up with the points you mentioned to contain future outbreaks.

Contact tracing only works if you have enough people to do it. We've had four? contact incidents in my family so far, two that have lead to mandatory quarantines. We were only contacted once by local authorities, after an infection spread shut down most of my son's day care center. We were contacted days after everyone already knew what had happened and started to self quarantine, and, honestly, had it not happened at a day care, we likely wouldn't have been contacted at all.

Mandatory masks also aren't guaranteed to be effective. We had several people where I work get infected, even though they were (from what is being said), following appropriate measures.

[melling]

How effective are the apps for contact tracing?

Getting people to use them is work but there should be a huge savings in human effort.

[zhdc1]

From a quick look at what's been published so far, they appear to be very effective if they have a high enough adoption rate and if people self quarantine after contact.

This is ancedotal, but the benefit of having a live person, working in an official capacity, doing the contact tracing, is that it gives definitive weight to the decision to quarantine and get tested.