On the Futility of Contact Tracing

On the Futility of Contact Tracing(inference-review.com)

7 points by ismiseted 5 years ago | 8 comments

makomk 5 years ago |

South Korea has been demonstrating the limits of contact tracing for a while - "looking for one’s lost keys under the glow of a streetlight" is about right - but you wouldn't get that impression from the coverage in western media, which seems more interested in pushing a narrative than anything else. The percentage of cases that aren't linked to any existing case just keeps on going up, even though they really don't have any way to detect those cases reliably, and they rely on the same kind of large-scale social distancing and business closures as countries with less extensive contact tracing even though most people probably have the opposite impression. (Every time they loosen those restrictions cases keep going up, which doesn't stop them from repeatedly attempting to anyway.)

It was definitely worth trying in the early days of the epidemic, and almost every country did so with reasonable success initially - even the US, not that you'd know that from the media coverage unless you paid close attention - but once Covid is endemic and there's a bunch of unknown, undetected cases contact tracing seems to lose a lot of its power.

pmkiwi 5 years ago | |

Of course if the outbreak becomes out of control, the efficiency of contact tracing is severly lowered. But even if the % of people linked to a cluster via contact tracing is low, it still has real value. If you couple it with genomics sequencing and pool testing, contact tracing (long) chains of transmission and help (re)directing resources where the cases truly are.

cameldrv 5 years ago | |

It's working extremely well compared to the U.S. The death rate in S. Korea is 37/1,000,000, one of the lowest in the world. In the U.S. it's 1,797/1,000,000. That's 48x better than the U.S. I'd say whatever they're doing is working even if it isn't absolutely perfect.

jjgreen 5 years ago |

Interesting response and counter-response: https://inference-review.com/letter/contact-tracing-is-far-f...

cameldrv 5 years ago |

This is the guy that says that young people shouldn’t get vaccinated and a couple of months ago that Indians shouldn’t get vaccinated because they already had herd immunity from infection. He literally wants everyone to get infected, and everything he has published during the pandemic supports this. Contact tracing, if it worked, would be at cross purposes with his desired outcome.

If this isn’t your desired outcome, take his reasoning with a skeptical eye.

pmkiwi 5 years ago |

I read a lot of articles about the pandemic but this one goes directly to my pile of BS...

> While there is a clear public benefit from identifying and isolating positive cases, individual patients gain little or no private benefit.

Maybe it is time to think more about the society we live in rather than always thinking "Me, myself, and I", no? This selfishness everywhere and in the US in particular keeps shocking me all the time!

Nobody never claimed that contract tracing was the only way to slow down and eventually stop this pandemic. It is one weapon among many that countries should deploy to fight it. It has, of course, its advantaged and drawbacks, and I can't agree more that concerns about privacy are real but the examples given are really bad faith such as

> it may be much harder to admit that they attended a private dinner party.

Well... if you breached lockdown restrictions, I can imagine that you feel a bit annoyed to share this information but it is not the contact tracer to judge what you have done. It happened so let's share the information to eventually avoid someone else to suffer because of you (mistake or not).

The concept of defense in depth (gruyere style!) is not only for a war or the IT world, it can be applied to fight COVID-19 too. Vaccines, quarantines, testing, contact tracing, self-isolation, masks, social distancing, reduction of risky behaviours, etc ... they all help so claiming that because this way is not perfect it is futile to use it is really silly.

> It might be useful in slowing the spread of the epidemic in areas where hospital resources are at risk of congestion.

Are they not at risk everywhere??

Finally,

> even a successful contact tracing effort leaves most of the population vulnerable to future infection by SARS-CoV-2.

I have heard this numerous time and it is an incredibly short-term view IMO... More and more papers report about long COVID for a non negligeable % of patients so I personally prefer to live in a country like NZ where we fought/fight/will fight to keep the virus out until we got vaccines/treatment rather than targetting a potential herd immunity.

jhayward 5 years ago |

The lead author, Jay Bhattacharya, with Trump advisor Scott Atlas, is a primary author of the "Great Barrington Declaration" which attempts to foist the Hoover Institute's anarchist/libertarian viewpoint on the world that public health interventions should not be used in a pandemic and that the disease should be left to run wild.

soupfordummies 5 years ago | |

Thanks for this important context here.