6 ms·

No amount of budget-boosting would be enough to keep up with exponential growth. If they hired enough people to cope with the contact tracing load near the end

by makomk 6y ago

No amount of budget-boosting would be enough to keep up with exponential growth. If they hired enough people to cope with the contact tracing load near the end of lockdown plus a little bit of an increase, and then the increase was faster than expected, that sounds like a pretty clear sign that contact tracing is not a workable solution. (Which is, as I understand it, pretty much what we'd expect. Contact tracing has not conventionally been seen as even remotely viable for a respiratory disease like this one.)

irrational 6y ago
I thought contact tracing was exactly how countries like South Korea kept their numbers so low?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It's unclear. Rates in South Korea are rising, and they've generally used somewhat broad shutdowns in addition to contact tracing. (For example, when there were positive cases found in Seoul bars, they closed all the bars in the city for weeks.)
- on_and_off 6y ago
  contact tracing + massive testing. It is unclear to me why this wasn't doable in more countries but this has been one of the very few winning strategies. (not trying to be malicious here, I admit that I don't know the logistics of large scale testing and why it wasn't applicable to more countries).
- usaar333 6y ago
  Well, that and an actually effective isolation program.
maxerickson 6y ago
Absolutely not viable as the sole mitigation, but when rates are very low it is a useful tool in keeping them low.
lostlogin 6y ago
With minimal budget and used in isolation, this is what you get. It is viable when used with other (strict) measures.
- trhway 6y ago
  it seems that it is viable up to a specific scale, and we're already past that scale. Honestly, my imagination fails to come up with a remotely plausible math model of containment, say in CA, of further spread from the current 400K (4M after the CDC 10x multiplier with the most being unaware of being a carrier) cases in 40M population.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    It’s hard to fault what you are saying - with over 2 million active cases in the US it’s a truely massive task to contemplate. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
FuckButtons 6y ago
Apart from all the places that are doing it successfully of course which you have for some reason ignored.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Government officials, unfortunately, have to pursue policies that work in the specific area they're responsible for. If contact tracing isn't effective in their area, they have to respond to that - it's unproductive for them to say it should in principle work based on what other governments have seen.
  - Retric 6y ago
    It’s not the physical locations that are making a difference. It’s the people and policies working together that make social distancing and contract tracing etc effective or not.
    - kd5bjo 6y ago
      The physical location matters a lot as well. Geographical barriers like oceans and mountains do a lot to reduce transmission across borders; getting domestic cases under control won’t help much if new ones keep getting imported. This is particularly important for metro areas that span multiple local jurisdictions: a single authority can’t do significantly better (or worse) than its neighbors, so they have to act in concert with each other. Ruling by committee is inevitably slower than by fiat, which makes it harder to handle highly dynamic situations.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Local jurisdictions within a city should have little to no control over policies in a pandemic like this. Giving them that control rather than operating at a higher level is idiotic. China was relatively successful because they sacrificed the economy of Wuhan early, but acting even sooner could have completely contained the virus and prevented the pandemic.
threatripper 6y ago
> No amount of budget-boosting would be enough to keep up with exponential growth. Right now it would take an atomic mushroom cloud and/or the military in the streets to keep people at home for an extended period of time. And even then we would see 3-6 weeks of exponential rise in case numbers because testing is just so far behind and you will have tons of follow-up cases.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- m0zg 6y ago
  Yeah, 161K per million and 53.2 million tests is "so far behind". You should diversify your news intake at this point. The United States is well on track to becoming the most tested large country in the world, and its testing rate is already the highest among large countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-people-smoothed-7-day https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-...
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    This discussion thread is in response to an article called "What's the point of Covid-19 test that takes 19 days for results?" If the contents are to be believed, that seems pretty far behind to me...
    - m0zg 6y ago
      The title makes it sound like a significant fraction of them are taking this long, which is simply not true. The article takes a few anecdotes and makes it sound like it's like that in every case. Then the article predictably shits on Trump, whose (verifiably true) statements that the US leads the world in testing throughput at the moment it is unable to refute with facts, so it uses the aforementioned anecdotes to make it seem like this doesn't matter, tacking on a few more anecdotes and opinions towards the end. This is why the press is not trustworthy.
      - 6y ago
imglorp 6y ago
I'll posit that political will counts double because you need everyone behind you to contact trace, both the agencies and the populace. It's not just budget. Anecdote. An acquaintance is a disease export working for NIH near DC who also does contract tracing in the field. Sometimes their contact with the public includes death threats, refusals to cooperate, and even been spit on. They are good people trying to prevent more illness. Some of the public has been coached that the doctors are taking their jobs, closing employers, etc. Leadership needs to get everyone behind the same spear so we can snuff this out quickly.
- nradov 6y ago
  We're not going to snuff this out quickly regardless of whether people cooperate with contact tracers. SARS-CoV-2 will become the fifth circulating endemic coronavirus in the worldwide human population (plus some animals). Eradicating it has become effectively impossible, and not even the development of a vaccine will change that.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    It's concerning to me to see this downvoted. As far as I know, almost every health official on the planet believes the virus can't be eradicated at this point, even in the countries that have kept it heavily suppressed. The long-term goal is to get it under control in the same way as tuberculosis.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      Or, if we're lucky, the common cold. Harmless virus strains are usually more successful than ones that prompt their hosts to isolate themselves.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
btilly 6y ago
Contact tracing has not conventionally been seen as even remotely viable for a respiratory disease like this one. Source needed. It is, for example, what we used successfully to stop SARS from doing what COVID-19 has done. But you have to get levels low enough first. The US response is the worst of all worlds. We do enough to trash our economy but not enough to keep the disease from its inevitable march.
- makomk 6y ago
  SARS is both much more deadly than COVID-19 and less infectious (in particular, people didn't seem to spread it prior to developing symptoms). Both of those things make contact tracing far more viable - the high hospitalization and death rate means that outbreaks could be detected really promptly and reliably because people turned up in hospitals with symptoms, and the fact it spread less effectively made it easy to track down the other people in the outbreak and quarantine them. On the other hand, COVID-19 is similar enough to the flu that contact tracing it should be even more futile than trying to contain the flu via contact tracing. Also, if the things that worked successfully to stop SARS from doing what COVID-19 has done worked for it as well, then it would have been stopped just like SARS. All the western countries like the US, UK, Italy (I think), etc did SARS-style contact tracing starting really early on. It just didn't work this time around. There's not a huge amount of media coverage of this because it doesn't fit the narrative, but you should be able to find some.
  - xkjyeah 6y ago
    They are still doing contact tracing, and even doubling down on it
- on_and_off 6y ago
  to be fair, if nothing had been done, it is pretty likely that the surge of deaths would have trashed the economy just as well. Not that I disagree that the US response has been among the worst .. and the bar is pretty low with only a handful of countries (like south korea and Taiwan) having been able to promptly adopt effective strategies.

by makomk 6y ago

irrational 6y ago

I thought contact tracing was exactly how countries like South Korea kept their numbers so low?

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It's unclear. Rates in South Korea are rising, and they've generally used somewhat broad shutdowns in addition to contact tracing. (For example, when there were positive cases found in Seoul bars, they closed all the bars in the city for weeks.)
on_and_off 6y ago
contact tracing + massive testing. It is unclear to me why this wasn't doable in more countries but this has been one of the very few winning strategies. (not trying to be malicious here, I admit that I don't know the logistics of large scale testing and why it wasn't applicable to more countries).
usaar333 6y ago
Well, that and an actually effective isolation program.

maxerickson 6y ago

Absolutely not viable as the sole mitigation, but when rates are very low it is a useful tool in keeping them low.

lostlogin 6y ago

With minimal budget and used in isolation, this is what you get. It is viable when used with other (strict) measures.

trhway 6y ago
it seems that it is viable up to a specific scale, and we're already past that scale. Honestly, my imagination fails to come up with a remotely plausible math model of containment, say in CA, of further spread from the current 400K (4M after the CDC 10x multiplier with the most being unaware of being a carrier) cases in 40M population.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 6y ago
  It’s hard to fault what you are saying - with over 2 million active cases in the US it’s a truely massive task to contemplate. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

FuckButtons 6y ago

Apart from all the places that are doing it successfully of course which you have for some reason ignored.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Government officials, unfortunately, have to pursue policies that work in the specific area they're responsible for. If contact tracing isn't effective in their area, they have to respond to that - it's unproductive for them to say it should in principle work based on what other governments have seen.
- Retric 6y ago
  It’s not the physical locations that are making a difference. It’s the people and policies working together that make social distancing and contract tracing etc effective or not.
  - kd5bjo 6y ago
    The physical location matters a lot as well. Geographical barriers like oceans and mountains do a lot to reduce transmission across borders; getting domestic cases under control won’t help much if new ones keep getting imported. This is particularly important for metro areas that span multiple local jurisdictions: a single authority can’t do significantly better (or worse) than its neighbors, so they have to act in concert with each other. Ruling by committee is inevitably slower than by fiat, which makes it harder to handle highly dynamic situations.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Local jurisdictions within a city should have little to no control over policies in a pandemic like this. Giving them that control rather than operating at a higher level is idiotic. China was relatively successful because they sacrificed the economy of Wuhan early, but acting even sooner could have completely contained the virus and prevented the pandemic.

threatripper 6y ago

> No amount of budget-boosting would be enough to keep up with exponential growth. Right now it would take an atomic mushroom cloud and/or the military in the streets to keep people at home for an extended period of time. And even then we would see 3-6 weeks of exponential rise in case numbers because testing is just so far behind and you will have tons of follow-up cases.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m0zg 6y ago
Yeah, 161K per million and 53.2 million tests is "so far behind". You should diversify your news intake at this point. The United States is well on track to becoming the most tested large country in the world, and its testing rate is already the highest among large countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-people-smoothed-7-day https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-...
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  This discussion thread is in response to an article called "What's the point of Covid-19 test that takes 19 days for results?" If the contents are to be believed, that seems pretty far behind to me...
  - m0zg 6y ago
    The title makes it sound like a significant fraction of them are taking this long, which is simply not true. The article takes a few anecdotes and makes it sound like it's like that in every case. Then the article predictably shits on Trump, whose (verifiably true) statements that the US leads the world in testing throughput at the moment it is unable to refute with facts, so it uses the aforementioned anecdotes to make it seem like this doesn't matter, tacking on a few more anecdotes and opinions towards the end. This is why the press is not trustworthy.
    - 6y ago

imglorp 6y ago

I'll posit that political will counts double because you need everyone behind you to contact trace, both the agencies and the populace. It's not just budget. Anecdote. An acquaintance is a disease export working for NIH near DC who also does contract tracing in the field. Sometimes their contact with the public includes death threats, refusals to cooperate, and even been spit on. They are good people trying to prevent more illness. Some of the public has been coached that the doctors are taking their jobs, closing employers, etc. Leadership needs to get everyone behind the same spear so we can snuff this out quickly.

nradov 6y ago
We're not going to snuff this out quickly regardless of whether people cooperate with contact tracers. SARS-CoV-2 will become the fifth circulating endemic coronavirus in the worldwide human population (plus some animals). Eradicating it has become effectively impossible, and not even the development of a vaccine will change that.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It's concerning to me to see this downvoted. As far as I know, almost every health official on the planet believes the virus can't be eradicated at this point, even in the countries that have kept it heavily suppressed. The long-term goal is to get it under control in the same way as tuberculosis.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    Or, if we're lucky, the common cold. Harmless virus strains are usually more successful than ones that prompt their hosts to isolate themselves.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

btilly 6y ago

Contact tracing has not conventionally been seen as even remotely viable for a respiratory disease like this one. Source needed. It is, for example, what we used successfully to stop SARS from doing what COVID-19 has done. But you have to get levels low enough first. The US response is the worst of all worlds. We do enough to trash our economy but not enough to keep the disease from its inevitable march.

makomk 6y ago
SARS is both much more deadly than COVID-19 and less infectious (in particular, people didn't seem to spread it prior to developing symptoms). Both of those things make contact tracing far more viable - the high hospitalization and death rate means that outbreaks could be detected really promptly and reliably because people turned up in hospitals with symptoms, and the fact it spread less effectively made it easy to track down the other people in the outbreak and quarantine them. On the other hand, COVID-19 is similar enough to the flu that contact tracing it should be even more futile than trying to contain the flu via contact tracing. Also, if the things that worked successfully to stop SARS from doing what COVID-19 has done worked for it as well, then it would have been stopped just like SARS. All the western countries like the US, UK, Italy (I think), etc did SARS-style contact tracing starting really early on. It just didn't work this time around. There's not a huge amount of media coverage of this because it doesn't fit the narrative, but you should be able to find some.
- xkjyeah 6y ago
  They are still doing contact tracing, and even doubling down on it
on_and_off 6y ago
to be fair, if nothing had been done, it is pretty likely that the surge of deaths would have trashed the economy just as well. Not that I disagree that the US response has been among the worst .. and the bar is pretty low with only a handful of countries (like south korea and Taiwan) having been able to promptly adopt effective strategies.