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It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and h

It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. People informing their fiends/family “hey I just got Covid you should probably test/isolate” was what practically can make a difference. Ventilators were the critical thing until we realized they were a very sub optimal treatment. All the surface cleaning was a massive waste too... and the chemicals used in some places destroyed a bunch of furniture. Masks, fresh air, don’t go out when sick or after close contact with someone when sick. Simpler things that make the most difference.

pradn 5y ago
Also remember how the CDC didn't advise wearing a mask for the first month or two of the pandemic? We came around to that, too.
- mattferderer 5y ago
  .NET Rocks did a great Geek Out podcast on that which explained it in layman's terms - https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1720 https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1720 If I recall, the CDC was recommending treatment that worked against past similar viruses. This one turned out to be spread in a completely different way than typical.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    This excuse doesn't make any sense. Their messaging at the time was "masks aren't effective, plus we need them for healthcare workers to care for pandemic patients". If they're not effective, why would healthcare workers need them? Higher viral loads put you at higher risk, but the messaging decidedly wasn't that masks are only protective at high viral loads. Let alone the incredibly basic prior on respiratory diseases' vector being limited by _covering up the sources of spread_. The initial recommendation, the flip-flop, and attempts to explain it away have been universally incoherent, because the real reason is that the CDC and FDA combine the worst of the federal government's bureaucratic inefficiency with medical culture's innumeracy and blind status quo bias. Leaving aside the failures of pandemic preparedness stretching back multiple administrations (the PPE stockpile had been depleted since 2013, and I don't need to describe the trump admin's failures..), it would have been trivial to do what we eventually did, and what many other countries did: recommend face coverings of any sort, and encourage people to save n95s for medical personnel. The insane route we ended up taking had people hoarding n95s anyway and deeply poisoned the well of trust in public health authorities in general and masks in particular (helped along by our president).
    - caddemon 5y ago
      They also at one point early on said that wearing a mask if you have COVID can prevent you from spreading it, it just won't protect you from getting it at all. This was simultaneous with the recommendation that laymen not wear masks, but also with the recommendation that everyone should behave as if they have COVID because of asymptomatic spread. The messaging not only raised red flags based on both Asian SARS experience and just using common sense, it was also internally contradictory.
    - ff317 5y ago
      > masks aren't effective, plus we need them for healthcare workers to care for pandemic patients I noted this at the time as well, but I read it (perhaps between the lines a bit) as more like: masks probably help, but if you all go panic-buy masks like you do TP, there will be none left for healthcare workers, who need them more than you do.
      - wutbrodo 5y ago
        That's possible, but the route we went with got us the worst of both worlds. There were gov'ts that simply told the entire country to use scarves or sew string to cloth and put it over their mouth. Lying about the efficacy of all masks to preserve a specific kind is just about the stupidest approach to the problem I can imagine. Note that even if your theory is correct, it also means that public health authorities have been continually lying to us after their mask flip-flop, with the Surgeon General claiming in April that it's because they didn't know asymptomatic transmission was possible. This is, of course, horseshit, as there were Chinese reports of asymptomatic transmission as early as January. The only theory which fits all the evidence is the one I laid out: asymptomatic transmission did not have a solid, high-quality study behind it yet, and medical culture has serious problems doing anything but rounding priors and weak evidence down to "zero evidence" instead of doing the difficult work of choosing the best option under uncertainty. It's ludicrous to claim that telling people to put scarves over their face would deplete , and that this cost-benefit suddenly flipped the moment the level of evidence for mask efficacy rose from "no-brainer if you're capable of modeling uncertainty" to "has a specific high-quality study supporting it in narrow conditions".
  - caddemon 5y ago
    My understanding is that it is not atypical for SARS though? I thought that was the main reason Asia was big on masks, which should have suggested that we ought to at least consider masks. My guess is it was some combination of uncertainty about effectiveness in the general public and wanting masks to be available for healthcare workers, so they ran with the messaging they did. IMO if they didn't want to make a statement that could lead to hoarding in the early days they should have just said nothing about masks until production was ramped up. Masks are such a minimally invasive preventative measure that given uncertainty about their effectiveness you would normally err on the side of encouraging.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      The other downside of such statements is excessive belief: "wearing medical-grade masks correctly might help" is understood as "wearing anything over your face will provide perfect protection".
      - caddemon 5y ago
        Can you point to any countries that encouraged mask use where that ended up being the general sentiment? It's not like encouraging mask use means restrictions on shopping, dining, etc. wouldn't also exist. Besides, you could make the same argument for something like wearing a helmet while bike riding. I'm sure there are situations where false peace of mind is a problem, but I don't see why we should assume mask wearing would be one of them. At the time they were obviously operating with limited information, but it's crazy to me that people continue to defend the early pandemic mask messaging. They screwed up, it happens, but it should be acknowledged and there should be a post mortem.
        mcguire 5y ago
        Most "N95" masks that are generally available (i.e. those from Home Depot) have the rubber flapper valves for exhalation. Think they do anything much useful medically? How many people have you seen wearing clear plastic face shields or bandannas tied around their face like Ol' West banditos, with the bottom open? How about with the mask pulled down below their nose? (Disclaimer: I did that the other day; I was at the optometrist and my breath was fogging up the lens thingy.) The early pandemic mask messaging was wrong. A postmortem might very well find that they made the best recommendations they could based on what they knew.[1] Unless you've already decided that they screwed up because they're lying idiots. [1] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138301: "(I note that there was a meeting of epidemiologists in March, 2020, where famously, no one wore masks. How far are you willing to to go to lie?)"
  - ummonk 5y ago
    That's not true. Masks have worked against other viruses too - it's just something the western epidemiological community has always been slow to adopt, despite empirical evidence.
- craftinator 5y ago
  That was more a political and logistics issue than well reasoned health position. Any reasonable person knows that wearing a mask will help stop the spread of an airborne disease. It's why doctors, nurses, and surgeons wear them. Basic knowledge of either physics or biology will inform a person of this.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    When the CDC says "Don't wear a mask, it won't help you", that has the effect of degrading trust in the CDC. People who know that's BS won't trust the CDC in the future, and people who don't know that's BS will lose trust when the CDC flip-flops and says that maybe masks actually are helpful. I think that contributed to the politicization of mask wearing in the US.
    - icelancer 5y ago
      The noble lie. Never works. Contributes to populism.
      - craftinator 5y ago
        The upside is that it tells us who the morons and bad actors are. If a person repeats this "guidance", you immediately know they either have chosen not to think the situation through at all, or they are trying to push some agenda because their stated position makes no sense. Noise in a signal is a signal.
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    I still can't believe the amount of people that make the "like using a chain-link fence to stop mosquitos" analogy...
- c3534l 5y ago
  Yeah, because there were problems making sure there was sufficient supply for medical staff.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    That doesn't mean that misleading the public about the effectiveness of masks in the early pandemic was the right way to go about it. The CDC came out and said that masks wouldn't protect the wearer. I also saw blog posts from people in public health departments at respectable universities about how masks on laymen have no effect because we can't wear them right/will touch our face too much to adjust them. Whether they believed that at the time is unclear to me, but that was the theory being pushed by a bunch of experts to explain the CDC guidance. I think we were overestimating the transmission risk from surfaces/face touching at that time. I also think we underestimated the effectiveness of basic cloth masks thinking that only filters would be useful. COVID is more likely to spread via larger droplets than some other viruses. However a closer look at literature from Asia on the previous SARS pandemic should have suggested that masks are more likely than not worth promoting. So I have to wonder if they considered what would happen if/when they had to flip the story once masks became more available. I doubt they expected it to become such a critical part of the pandemic response, otherwise they probably would have been more careful with messaging. Of course these decisions were made under a lot of pressure with not much time to strategize - I just hope they learn from this and reconsider a bit how they communicate. Because I do think this exacerbated the anti-mask issue. IMO they could have even avoided Trump making it political if one of the day 0 rallying cries was to ramp up mask production.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      > about how masks on laymen have no effect because we can't wear them right/will touch our face too much to adjust them. Whether they believed that at the time is unclear to me, but that was the theory being pushed by a bunch of experts to explain the CDC guidance. This is even more hilariously stupid than it sounds, as the same studies showed that only 10% higher a proportion of medical personnel than the general public can properly fit their masks. And yet it would be insane to claim that it's useless for medical personnel to wear PPE.
dariusj18 5y ago
> Ventilators were the critical thing Ventilators are still a critical thing, but they are a last resort, not a normal treatment. The reason they were a big deal was because with a large enough spike we would run out of them (availability-wise) and I don't think people understand what that would do to the psyche of the populace.
- ddalex 5y ago
  Sadly this is the case now in India....
  - crossroadsguy 5y ago
    In India availability of ventilators is couple of steps ahead. We have run out of hospitals (we have too few anyway), run out of beds, ambulances, stretchers, oxygen cylinders. Doctors and nurses too. They are falling sick and dying in large numbers.
- Izkata 5y ago
  No, in March last year doctors were prematurely jumping to ventilators because of a confusing hypoxia-like symptom: blood oxygen levels dropping into "you should already be dead" levels. Ventilator use dropped off once this stopped and they switched to other treatments for the less serious cases.
  - lofi_lory 5y ago
    Could you elaborate or link a source. I have a hard time believing acting on lethal blood oxygen levels somehow does not apply if infected with SARS2.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      You should look it up for yourself, there are tons of articles saying that respirators were being used too quickly when things like putting the patients facedown were a better solution in most cases. This is before much was known about the virus and doctors were using the tools they knew about. Obviously they are still being used but much more sparingly than initially.
wpietri 5y ago
> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. The problem with contact tracing in the US definitely wasn't an excess of effort: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4 And more generally, I think it's great that lots of effort went into things that were then superseded by things that worked better. Sitting around waiting for perfect knowledge would have meant a much larger death toll. Indeed, the knowledge about better treatments came because people tried a great number of things and then doubled down on the ones that worked. Trying things is never wasted effort if at the time they were a good guess about what might work.
tjs8rj 5y ago
I think this is a consequence of “make your product for the customer”. I think it should’ve been obvious that Americans weren’t Koreans or Kiwis in attitude, numbers, or behavior, and so the solutions requiring that level of cooperation and attention should’ve never left the drawing board. As we’ve seen and as should’ve been obvious: Americans are resistant to authority for one. Solution that get too overbearing too quickly can work, but they have to keep that in mind when considered. At the public health level I hope the architects of these policies at least recognized that fact, even if the whirlwind of spins and politicization in the public made it seem like everything was failing spectacularly.
stonesweep 5y ago
> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. I am a US citizen, I simply have lost confidence in any promise made by any tech company in regards to my privacy and roll back to War Games - the only winning move is not to play. We have lost all confidence that any data shared will be kept private, there is little oversight or penalty for abuse of it.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Po-Shen Loh's NOVID app from CMU held some promise.
  - davidthewatson 5y ago
    Indeed, Novid did have promise. Po's work should be celebrated. The problem is that Novid depends on self-report. Self-report is not reliable, or else we'd have seen success around this kind of self-reported contact tracing, which does not model reality accurately at scale. The problem is that a surveillance network is perfect for this kind of healthcare application, where the balance of power is toward the invisible surveiller and does not depend on the surveilled being compliant.
- pydry 5y ago
  I think a lot of people think this way even outside of tech.
- srswtf123 5y ago
  I agree 110% -- The best solution is to stop using their products; put down the smartphones, remove FAANG & co. from your life entirely. You end up less lonely, less depressed, less tracked, and oddly, somehow now I feel better informed.
Naga 5y ago
All the surface cleaning was a massive waste? How about was and continues to be. At least where I live in Ontario, stores still won't let you touch products, require hand washing, wipe down all the carts, etc. It's all theatre that doesn't really do anything to stop the spread of covid but has the benefit of making it look like they are doing something. Another example is that while schools are closed now again (because they aren't safe), the government until a few weeks ago was bragging about how safe schools were because of their extensive cleaning procedures, which did nothing to make schools safe since ventilation was the key!
- sdljfjafsd 5y ago
  In Portland retail stores require you to hand sanitize every time you enter which becomes a bit cumbersome if you enter a few stores during a trip. And yes, the extra effort has a cost, because I've been told to sanitize in front of employees who are interacting with groups of customers at close distance (while masked tbf). At the end of the day humans have a small set of things they can juggle in their minds and that focus should be on ventilation, spacing, and masking instead of wasting focus on unnecessary surface cleaning.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- olyjohn 5y ago
  There's a go-kart track near me... and they have someone who goes around after each session and sprays some kind of fog on the karts. I presume it's a "sanitizer" but if you look how sanitizers work, they still take time to act and it takes a decent quantity of it to work. Meanwhile the steering wheels are covered in pourous foam / plastic / rubber, which is soaking up everybody's sweat, germs and bacteria... and some how this fog, which is safe for the person spraying it to stand in, sanitizes the entire kart in under a few seconds and leaves behind no residue...
  - jborichevskiy 5y ago
    Still better are the two-person crews in full gear spraying this fine mist over airport lobby chairs and furniture (and people sitting nearby) while wearing enough PPO to look like late stage Chernobyl responders. Security performance theater.
CarelessExpert 5y ago
> It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. Is it? Thousands of people began dying from a novel mass pandemic, while years of complacency ensured governments weren't prepared for this inevitability. Who would be surprised that they threw everything they could against the wall? The real question is: will we learn anything from this going forward?
- IQunder130 5y ago
  What is there to learn? Events like this are rare enough that it's hard to justify any overhead for dealing with them in the off-period and it inevitably gets cut. Same as with that extreme weather event taking down the Texas grid.
  - atonse 5y ago
    Sure there's a lot to be learned. Even something as basic as having a national stockpile again, learning that we should have a decent manufacturing base for these kinds of critical items, and all the lessons about how to communicate with the public regarding health recommendations. There's plenty to be learned.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >What is there to learn? Lots actually. Just like Edision found 999 ways not to make a light bulb. We also learned (re-learned) that common sense is not so common, and that people are just really not into being told what to do. >Events like this are rare enough Things that used to be "rare" are occurring more frequently to be considered "rare". Maybe more into the area of "uncommon". The Texas grid example is something so stupid to have allowed to happen after it just happend 10 years prior and with a simple (yet expensive-ish) solution. COVID-19 has had warnings of its level of spread for years with SARS, bird flus, etc. Those in charge of disaster prevention/recovery have failed us.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      > COVID-19 has had warnings of its level of spread for years with SARS, bird flus, etc. To me this was all "boy who cried wolf" stuff. I certainly remember media fear porn about SARS, about the expected severity of the next upcoming flu season, etc. It never amounted to anything significant in reality.
teachingassist 5y ago
Contact tracing is an sort of interesting solution It works great when you have just a few cases and are highly motivated to stop them from spreading (Asia/Oceania) and it doesn't work at all, when you have a lot of cases and have no interest in doing what's necessary to contain them (Americas/Europe) Mass-market contact tracing, in hindsight, was completely pointless. I'm not personally aware of anyone who has been informed accurately of potential infection via a Bluetooth app.
- jfoster 5y ago
  Are you sure? My take on why mass market contact tracing didn't pan out was that it was insufficiently implemented/used. If it were on every phone and on by default, perhaps even mandated, would it still not have worked? I know that many people take significant issue with that approach, but it would have made more of a difference, right?
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    There are a number of prerequisites, for this to work, that were not mandated in the US and Europe. If someone is informed of a potential or likely infection, but then typically [chooses to/is able to] go about their day the same as usual, then what's the point of tracing them? Initial modelling that showed contact tracing to potentially work assumed: 80% uptake, over 70s to be isolated in any case, and people to strictly follow isolation rules, none of which was considered politically possible in the West: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52294896 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52294896
    - jfoster 5y ago
      Yeah, a lot of it might not be politically or culturally possible. As far as I can tell, it was always technically possible to have very good automated contact tracing, though.
    - robrenaud 5y ago
      Adoption was by far the biggest problem. If Apple/Google just shipped it in the OS and made it opt out, I bet it would have had a significant impact. Not like turning the US into Australia, but even a 10% reduction in covid cases worldwide could have saved 300k lives.
mcherm 5y ago
> It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. It's not surprising at all! We had a choice between taking actions some of which might be wasted (like manufacturing large quantities of vaccines that hadn't yet completed the approval process, or creating a contact tracing app that might or might not prove useful), or not taking any actions until we were done investigating. No vaccines have yet been approved for Covid-19. There are, however, several which have received temporary authorizations for emergency use. I think we made the right choice. Waste a few resources, if need be, because we don't know for sure which approaches will pan out. But the ones that DO pan out will (HAVE) save hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions.
- salawat 5y ago
  Funny. I doubt the horsehoe crab population being decimated at an industrial scale when a synthetic alternative was available, but langishing unapproved would agree. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/covid-vaccine-needs-horseshoe-crab-blood https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/covid-vac... 3+ different vaccine production lines. 1 species as a supply bottleneck, and no one giving a damn that there needs be affordances made to not potentially drive a species to extinction. I'm normally not big on environmentalist concerns as a first order thing because it tends to get you tuned out in some circles but the scale becomes absolutely impossible to ignore in this case. Then you had other potential routes for treatment completely ignored due to the fact they're biologics and cannot be patented. Echinaecia purpurea among them. (Came in handy for me early on), and vitamin C to keep immune cell exhaustion at bay. No one ever heard about or researched any of it, nor was anyone comfortable bringing it up lest one get dog-piled as a "disinfo-spreading quack". Gotta wait for Big Pharma to bail you out doncha'know? The entire thing has just been one massive shitshow. It's a Catch-22. There's no way to define anything as medically sound except to have a company go balls-to-the-wall double-blind cert study, but no one will do that for something that can't be patented or have an industrial business model built around it. The externalities are a bit on the extreme side in my view.
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    Americans really do get the short end of the stick. Having to pay full whack to fund healthcare development while single payer systems just take the result at bargain basement prices. The only solution is to fund basic science research directly and remove the perverse incentives, but (as an outsider) it seems America does not have the political will to do anything so bold right now.
Smaug123 5y ago
Re ventilators specifically, remember that we had basically no treatment for severe Covid last March. The best we could do was sedate you, force air into your lungs, and hope for the best. Now we know that dexamethasone helps in severe cases, we have monoclonal antibody treatments, and generally we are better able to treat someone who would have needed a ventilator if we'd treated them last March. In general, I'm with the Tyler Cowen thought bubble: whatever we spent on actual treatments which didn't work out, it wasn't enough. Some of your criticisms are pretty incontrovertible. The Less Wrong zeitgeist in April 2020 (perhaps even earlier) was that surface cleaning was dubious - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/riB8m9PBvXJziFYMv/on-covid-19-superspreader-events-in-28-countries-critical https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/riB8m9PBvXJziFYMv/on-covid-1... - much like they were extremely early on the "loss of taste and smell" train (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/march-coronavirus-open-thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/march-coro...).
- nradov 5y ago
  The latest research indicates that Methylprednisolone is more effective than Dexamethasone. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0885066621994057 https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0885066621994057 https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/math-plus-protocol/ https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/math-plus...
  - Smaug123 5y ago
    Even better! (I merely stated two treatments I knew of which were found to be effective well after the point when we were making ventilator-related decisions. I am doubtless unaware of many more.)
jnwatson 5y ago
In my kid's high school (in Virginia, US), we have detailed contact tracing for all positive COVID tests. Contact tracing is done, and it seems to be done fairly thoroughly here.
skybrian 5y ago
Another example: instead of contact tracing with PCR tests, skip the tracing part and have everyone regularly take much cheaper antigen tests a couple times a week. As a result of the lack of vision, there was no urgency in the US to approve over-the-counter antigen tests and they only became available in pharmacies last week.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  We are doing that in the UK and it's pretty controversial, with many credible medical/epidemiology experts saying it's a bad idea. One risk is people assuming a negative test means they don't have covid. Personally I think they're a good idea, but it really depends on people understanding and following the guidance. The tests are not overly simple to administer.
fossuser 5y ago
The Bluetooth contact tracing would have been amazing, the design was smart, privacy preserving, and worked. The issue was a few things: - Opt-in instead of opt-out - People (even those on HN) not understanding how it worked and loudly and wrongly stating that it was a privacy nightmare. See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25629304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25629304 Unfortunately this lead governments and others to just buy data from brokers/3rd party app collectors and such that are not privacy preserving. A pretty frustrating situation.
- cactus2093 5y ago
  Completely agree with this. And the opt-in problem was twofold, you needed to opt in to receive notifications (and in California this option wasn't even available until like 6 months after the frameworks were available) and also needed to remember to manually upload your result to the system after testing positive. The testing centers should have been asking for people's contact tracing id info and they should have been the ones reporting results into the system. (They already have your full name/contact info when you book an appointment, and the contact tracing id is anonymous, so again this is not sacrificing your privacy any further). It seems like a major factor in why this idea was never taken seriously by governments was that professional contact tracers are still using the playbook from 70 years ago from the polio era where the only thing you try is cold calling people's home phones. The public health field seemed entirely uninterested in technological solutions, even though it seems incredibly obvious that these could have had massive benefits over the old fashioned way of doing things. As with several other things that happened over the course of this pandemic, I really just can't wrap my head around why the "experts" were so willing to just let half a million deaths rack up in the US rather than trying any new ideas. I would be interested to read more about contact tracing now though, and if any of them have changed their mind by this point.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    Agreed - the cold calling was a joke and only really started after community transmission was super widespread anyway.
- deleted 5y ago
pvorb 5y ago
> [...] and the chemicals used in some places destroyed a bunch of furniture. and several throats due to the excellent advice of a smart person.
toast0 5y ago
> Ventilators were the critical thing until we realized they were a very sub optimal treatment. Ventilators and ICU beds are the shortages people are/were talking about, but the real issue is staff to operate the ventilators and care for the people in the ICU beds. You can work to quickly manufacture more equipment and it was done, but training people to do ICU nursing isn't fast; especially when in-person learning is inadvisable. Even if you train up non-ICU nurses to do ICU nursing, you need to train replacements for what they were doing (or go without). We don't have a lot of spare nursing capacity, especially when there is near-worldwide excess demand.
mdoms 5y ago
Just because something didn't work in USA doesn't mean it "didn't pan out". Contact tracing has been used to track down contacts very rapidly in my country and presumably several others.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Contact tracing would have worked if there wasn't an exponential amount of community spread in the US compared to other countries.
- yosito 5y ago
  It would be interesting to see a metric for which countries did well with contact tracing and which didn't. Many countries tried it, and gave up. Some countries tried it and succeeded. A few countries didn't try at all.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
People wouldn't even wear masks, even more wouldn't have had a "government tracker" willingly in their pocket whether it not it was innocuous and anonymous or not.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I am personally convinced that US contract tracing results were suppressed. Massive amounts of data was collected and I believe it was possible to compile data from it about the situations and activates where transmission was known to occur. My guess is that the data could be used to argue against the public health policies of the same organizations that were collecting it. I looks forward to some of the data analysis released in the coming years.
rodgerd 5y ago
> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. People informing their fiends/family “hey I just got Covid you should probably test/isolate” was what practically can make a difference. Contact tracing has worked superbly in Australia and New Zealand. The fact that the US fucked things up completely doesn't mean that they were worthless techniques; rather than the US didn't want to stop people dying badly enough to make proper use of them.
wolverine876 5y ago
> It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. It is? We were dealing with an unknown disease. > Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. People informing their fiends/family “hey I just got Covid you should probably test/isolate” was what practically can make a difference. What is this based on? Contact tracing in the US wasn't executed much, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have had a large impact. I don't regularly exercise, therefore exercise wouldn't have a large impact?
tekknik 5y ago
> Ventilators were the critical thing until we realized they were a very sub optimal treatment. The ventilators kept people alive long enough to allow their immune system to take over and fight the virus. When you have a severe respiratory illness you will likely need a ventilator.

pradn 5y ago

Also remember how the CDC didn't advise wearing a mask for the first month or two of the pandemic? We came around to that, too.

mattferderer 5y ago
.NET Rocks did a great Geek Out podcast on that which explained it in layman's terms - https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1720 https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1720 If I recall, the CDC was recommending treatment that worked against past similar viruses. This one turned out to be spread in a completely different way than typical.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  This excuse doesn't make any sense. Their messaging at the time was "masks aren't effective, plus we need them for healthcare workers to care for pandemic patients". If they're not effective, why would healthcare workers need them? Higher viral loads put you at higher risk, but the messaging decidedly wasn't that masks are only protective at high viral loads. Let alone the incredibly basic prior on respiratory diseases' vector being limited by _covering up the sources of spread_. The initial recommendation, the flip-flop, and attempts to explain it away have been universally incoherent, because the real reason is that the CDC and FDA combine the worst of the federal government's bureaucratic inefficiency with medical culture's innumeracy and blind status quo bias. Leaving aside the failures of pandemic preparedness stretching back multiple administrations (the PPE stockpile had been depleted since 2013, and I don't need to describe the trump admin's failures..), it would have been trivial to do what we eventually did, and what many other countries did: recommend face coverings of any sort, and encourage people to save n95s for medical personnel. The insane route we ended up taking had people hoarding n95s anyway and deeply poisoned the well of trust in public health authorities in general and masks in particular (helped along by our president).
  - caddemon 5y ago
    They also at one point early on said that wearing a mask if you have COVID can prevent you from spreading it, it just won't protect you from getting it at all. This was simultaneous with the recommendation that laymen not wear masks, but also with the recommendation that everyone should behave as if they have COVID because of asymptomatic spread. The messaging not only raised red flags based on both Asian SARS experience and just using common sense, it was also internally contradictory.
  - ff317 5y ago
    > masks aren't effective, plus we need them for healthcare workers to care for pandemic patients I noted this at the time as well, but I read it (perhaps between the lines a bit) as more like: masks probably help, but if you all go panic-buy masks like you do TP, there will be none left for healthcare workers, who need them more than you do.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      That's possible, but the route we went with got us the worst of both worlds. There were gov'ts that simply told the entire country to use scarves or sew string to cloth and put it over their mouth. Lying about the efficacy of all masks to preserve a specific kind is just about the stupidest approach to the problem I can imagine. Note that even if your theory is correct, it also means that public health authorities have been continually lying to us after their mask flip-flop, with the Surgeon General claiming in April that it's because they didn't know asymptomatic transmission was possible. This is, of course, horseshit, as there were Chinese reports of asymptomatic transmission as early as January. The only theory which fits all the evidence is the one I laid out: asymptomatic transmission did not have a solid, high-quality study behind it yet, and medical culture has serious problems doing anything but rounding priors and weak evidence down to "zero evidence" instead of doing the difficult work of choosing the best option under uncertainty. It's ludicrous to claim that telling people to put scarves over their face would deplete , and that this cost-benefit suddenly flipped the moment the level of evidence for mask efficacy rose from "no-brainer if you're capable of modeling uncertainty" to "has a specific high-quality study supporting it in narrow conditions".
- caddemon 5y ago
  My understanding is that it is not atypical for SARS though? I thought that was the main reason Asia was big on masks, which should have suggested that we ought to at least consider masks. My guess is it was some combination of uncertainty about effectiveness in the general public and wanting masks to be available for healthcare workers, so they ran with the messaging they did. IMO if they didn't want to make a statement that could lead to hoarding in the early days they should have just said nothing about masks until production was ramped up. Masks are such a minimally invasive preventative measure that given uncertainty about their effectiveness you would normally err on the side of encouraging.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    The other downside of such statements is excessive belief: "wearing medical-grade masks correctly might help" is understood as "wearing anything over your face will provide perfect protection".
    - caddemon 5y ago
      Can you point to any countries that encouraged mask use where that ended up being the general sentiment? It's not like encouraging mask use means restrictions on shopping, dining, etc. wouldn't also exist. Besides, you could make the same argument for something like wearing a helmet while bike riding. I'm sure there are situations where false peace of mind is a problem, but I don't see why we should assume mask wearing would be one of them. At the time they were obviously operating with limited information, but it's crazy to me that people continue to defend the early pandemic mask messaging. They screwed up, it happens, but it should be acknowledged and there should be a post mortem.
      - mcguire 5y ago
        Most "N95" masks that are generally available (i.e. those from Home Depot) have the rubber flapper valves for exhalation. Think they do anything much useful medically? How many people have you seen wearing clear plastic face shields or bandannas tied around their face like Ol' West banditos, with the bottom open? How about with the mask pulled down below their nose? (Disclaimer: I did that the other day; I was at the optometrist and my breath was fogging up the lens thingy.) The early pandemic mask messaging was wrong. A postmortem might very well find that they made the best recommendations they could based on what they knew.[1] Unless you've already decided that they screwed up because they're lying idiots. [1] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138301: "(I note that there was a meeting of epidemiologists in March, 2020, where famously, no one wore masks. How far are you willing to to go to lie?)"
- ummonk 5y ago
  That's not true. Masks have worked against other viruses too - it's just something the western epidemiological community has always been slow to adopt, despite empirical evidence.
craftinator 5y ago
That was more a political and logistics issue than well reasoned health position. Any reasonable person knows that wearing a mask will help stop the spread of an airborne disease. It's why doctors, nurses, and surgeons wear them. Basic knowledge of either physics or biology will inform a person of this.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  When the CDC says "Don't wear a mask, it won't help you", that has the effect of degrading trust in the CDC. People who know that's BS won't trust the CDC in the future, and people who don't know that's BS will lose trust when the CDC flip-flops and says that maybe masks actually are helpful. I think that contributed to the politicization of mask wearing in the US.
  - icelancer 5y ago
    The noble lie. Never works. Contributes to populism.
    - craftinator 5y ago
      The upside is that it tells us who the morons and bad actors are. If a person repeats this "guidance", you immediately know they either have chosen not to think the situation through at all, or they are trying to push some agenda because their stated position makes no sense. Noise in a signal is a signal.
- throwaways885 5y ago
  I still can't believe the amount of people that make the "like using a chain-link fence to stop mosquitos" analogy...
c3534l 5y ago
Yeah, because there were problems making sure there was sufficient supply for medical staff.
- caddemon 5y ago
  That doesn't mean that misleading the public about the effectiveness of masks in the early pandemic was the right way to go about it. The CDC came out and said that masks wouldn't protect the wearer. I also saw blog posts from people in public health departments at respectable universities about how masks on laymen have no effect because we can't wear them right/will touch our face too much to adjust them. Whether they believed that at the time is unclear to me, but that was the theory being pushed by a bunch of experts to explain the CDC guidance. I think we were overestimating the transmission risk from surfaces/face touching at that time. I also think we underestimated the effectiveness of basic cloth masks thinking that only filters would be useful. COVID is more likely to spread via larger droplets than some other viruses. However a closer look at literature from Asia on the previous SARS pandemic should have suggested that masks are more likely than not worth promoting. So I have to wonder if they considered what would happen if/when they had to flip the story once masks became more available. I doubt they expected it to become such a critical part of the pandemic response, otherwise they probably would have been more careful with messaging. Of course these decisions were made under a lot of pressure with not much time to strategize - I just hope they learn from this and reconsider a bit how they communicate. Because I do think this exacerbated the anti-mask issue. IMO they could have even avoided Trump making it political if one of the day 0 rallying cries was to ramp up mask production.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    > about how masks on laymen have no effect because we can't wear them right/will touch our face too much to adjust them. Whether they believed that at the time is unclear to me, but that was the theory being pushed by a bunch of experts to explain the CDC guidance. This is even more hilariously stupid than it sounds, as the same studies showed that only 10% higher a proportion of medical personnel than the general public can properly fit their masks. And yet it would be insane to claim that it's useless for medical personnel to wear PPE.

dariusj18 5y ago

> Ventilators were the critical thing Ventilators are still a critical thing, but they are a last resort, not a normal treatment. The reason they were a big deal was because with a large enough spike we would run out of them (availability-wise) and I don't think people understand what that would do to the psyche of the populace.

ddalex 5y ago
Sadly this is the case now in India....
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  In India availability of ventilators is couple of steps ahead. We have run out of hospitals (we have too few anyway), run out of beds, ambulances, stretchers, oxygen cylinders. Doctors and nurses too. They are falling sick and dying in large numbers.
Izkata 5y ago
No, in March last year doctors were prematurely jumping to ventilators because of a confusing hypoxia-like symptom: blood oxygen levels dropping into "you should already be dead" levels. Ventilator use dropped off once this stopped and they switched to other treatments for the less serious cases.
- lofi_lory 5y ago
  Could you elaborate or link a source. I have a hard time believing acting on lethal blood oxygen levels somehow does not apply if infected with SARS2.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    You should look it up for yourself, there are tons of articles saying that respirators were being used too quickly when things like putting the patients facedown were a better solution in most cases. This is before much was known about the virus and doctors were using the tools they knew about. Obviously they are still being used but much more sparingly than initially.

wpietri 5y ago

> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. The problem with contact tracing in the US definitely wasn't an excess of effort: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03518-4 And more generally, I think it's great that lots of effort went into things that were then superseded by things that worked better. Sitting around waiting for perfect knowledge would have meant a much larger death toll. Indeed, the knowledge about better treatments came because people tried a great number of things and then doubled down on the ones that worked. Trying things is never wasted effort if at the time they were a good guess about what might work.

tjs8rj 5y ago

I think this is a consequence of “make your product for the customer”. I think it should’ve been obvious that Americans weren’t Koreans or Kiwis in attitude, numbers, or behavior, and so the solutions requiring that level of cooperation and attention should’ve never left the drawing board. As we’ve seen and as should’ve been obvious: Americans are resistant to authority for one. Solution that get too overbearing too quickly can work, but they have to keep that in mind when considered. At the public health level I hope the architects of these policies at least recognized that fact, even if the whirlwind of spins and politicization in the public made it seem like everything was failing spectacularly.

stonesweep 5y ago

> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. I am a US citizen, I simply have lost confidence in any promise made by any tech company in regards to my privacy and roll back to War Games - the only winning move is not to play. We have lost all confidence that any data shared will be kept private, there is little oversight or penalty for abuse of it.

selimthegrim 5y ago
Po-Shen Loh's NOVID app from CMU held some promise.
- davidthewatson 5y ago
  Indeed, Novid did have promise. Po's work should be celebrated. The problem is that Novid depends on self-report. Self-report is not reliable, or else we'd have seen success around this kind of self-reported contact tracing, which does not model reality accurately at scale. The problem is that a surveillance network is perfect for this kind of healthcare application, where the balance of power is toward the invisible surveiller and does not depend on the surveilled being compliant.
pydry 5y ago
I think a lot of people think this way even outside of tech.
srswtf123 5y ago
I agree 110% -- The best solution is to stop using their products; put down the smartphones, remove FAANG & co. from your life entirely. You end up less lonely, less depressed, less tracked, and oddly, somehow now I feel better informed.

Naga 5y ago

All the surface cleaning was a massive waste? How about was and continues to be. At least where I live in Ontario, stores still won't let you touch products, require hand washing, wipe down all the carts, etc. It's all theatre that doesn't really do anything to stop the spread of covid but has the benefit of making it look like they are doing something. Another example is that while schools are closed now again (because they aren't safe), the government until a few weeks ago was bragging about how safe schools were because of their extensive cleaning procedures, which did nothing to make schools safe since ventilation was the key!

sdljfjafsd 5y ago
In Portland retail stores require you to hand sanitize every time you enter which becomes a bit cumbersome if you enter a few stores during a trip. And yes, the extra effort has a cost, because I've been told to sanitize in front of employees who are interacting with groups of customers at close distance (while masked tbf). At the end of the day humans have a small set of things they can juggle in their minds and that focus should be on ventilation, spacing, and masking instead of wasting focus on unnecessary surface cleaning.
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olyjohn 5y ago
There's a go-kart track near me... and they have someone who goes around after each session and sprays some kind of fog on the karts. I presume it's a "sanitizer" but if you look how sanitizers work, they still take time to act and it takes a decent quantity of it to work. Meanwhile the steering wheels are covered in pourous foam / plastic / rubber, which is soaking up everybody's sweat, germs and bacteria... and some how this fog, which is safe for the person spraying it to stand in, sanitizes the entire kart in under a few seconds and leaves behind no residue...
- jborichevskiy 5y ago
  Still better are the two-person crews in full gear spraying this fine mist over airport lobby chairs and furniture (and people sitting nearby) while wearing enough PPO to look like late stage Chernobyl responders. Security performance theater.

CarelessExpert 5y ago

> It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. Is it? Thousands of people began dying from a novel mass pandemic, while years of complacency ensured governments weren't prepared for this inevitability. Who would be surprised that they threw everything they could against the wall? The real question is: will we learn anything from this going forward?

IQunder130 5y ago
What is there to learn? Events like this are rare enough that it's hard to justify any overhead for dealing with them in the off-period and it inevitably gets cut. Same as with that extreme weather event taking down the Texas grid.
- atonse 5y ago
  Sure there's a lot to be learned. Even something as basic as having a national stockpile again, learning that we should have a decent manufacturing base for these kinds of critical items, and all the lessons about how to communicate with the public regarding health recommendations. There's plenty to be learned.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >What is there to learn? Lots actually. Just like Edision found 999 ways not to make a light bulb. We also learned (re-learned) that common sense is not so common, and that people are just really not into being told what to do. >Events like this are rare enough Things that used to be "rare" are occurring more frequently to be considered "rare". Maybe more into the area of "uncommon". The Texas grid example is something so stupid to have allowed to happen after it just happend 10 years prior and with a simple (yet expensive-ish) solution. COVID-19 has had warnings of its level of spread for years with SARS, bird flus, etc. Those in charge of disaster prevention/recovery have failed us.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    > COVID-19 has had warnings of its level of spread for years with SARS, bird flus, etc. To me this was all "boy who cried wolf" stuff. I certainly remember media fear porn about SARS, about the expected severity of the next upcoming flu season, etc. It never amounted to anything significant in reality.

teachingassist 5y ago

Contact tracing is an sort of interesting solution It works great when you have just a few cases and are highly motivated to stop them from spreading (Asia/Oceania) and it doesn't work at all, when you have a lot of cases and have no interest in doing what's necessary to contain them (Americas/Europe) Mass-market contact tracing, in hindsight, was completely pointless. I'm not personally aware of anyone who has been informed accurately of potential infection via a Bluetooth app.

jfoster 5y ago
Are you sure? My take on why mass market contact tracing didn't pan out was that it was insufficiently implemented/used. If it were on every phone and on by default, perhaps even mandated, would it still not have worked? I know that many people take significant issue with that approach, but it would have made more of a difference, right?
- teachingassist 5y ago
  There are a number of prerequisites, for this to work, that were not mandated in the US and Europe. If someone is informed of a potential or likely infection, but then typically [chooses to/is able to] go about their day the same as usual, then what's the point of tracing them? Initial modelling that showed contact tracing to potentially work assumed: 80% uptake, over 70s to be isolated in any case, and people to strictly follow isolation rules, none of which was considered politically possible in the West: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52294896 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52294896
  - jfoster 5y ago
    Yeah, a lot of it might not be politically or culturally possible. As far as I can tell, it was always technically possible to have very good automated contact tracing, though.
  - robrenaud 5y ago
    Adoption was by far the biggest problem. If Apple/Google just shipped it in the OS and made it opt out, I bet it would have had a significant impact. Not like turning the US into Australia, but even a 10% reduction in covid cases worldwide could have saved 300k lives.

mcherm 5y ago

> It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. It's not surprising at all! We had a choice between taking actions some of which might be wasted (like manufacturing large quantities of vaccines that hadn't yet completed the approval process, or creating a contact tracing app that might or might not prove useful), or not taking any actions until we were done investigating. No vaccines have yet been approved for Covid-19. There are, however, several which have received temporary authorizations for emergency use. I think we made the right choice. Waste a few resources, if need be, because we don't know for sure which approaches will pan out. But the ones that DO pan out will (HAVE) save hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions.

salawat 5y ago
Funny. I doubt the horsehoe crab population being decimated at an industrial scale when a synthetic alternative was available, but langishing unapproved would agree. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/covid-vaccine-needs-horseshoe-crab-blood https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/covid-vac... 3+ different vaccine production lines. 1 species as a supply bottleneck, and no one giving a damn that there needs be affordances made to not potentially drive a species to extinction. I'm normally not big on environmentalist concerns as a first order thing because it tends to get you tuned out in some circles but the scale becomes absolutely impossible to ignore in this case. Then you had other potential routes for treatment completely ignored due to the fact they're biologics and cannot be patented. Echinaecia purpurea among them. (Came in handy for me early on), and vitamin C to keep immune cell exhaustion at bay. No one ever heard about or researched any of it, nor was anyone comfortable bringing it up lest one get dog-piled as a "disinfo-spreading quack". Gotta wait for Big Pharma to bail you out doncha'know? The entire thing has just been one massive shitshow. It's a Catch-22. There's no way to define anything as medically sound except to have a company go balls-to-the-wall double-blind cert study, but no one will do that for something that can't be patented or have an industrial business model built around it. The externalities are a bit on the extreme side in my view.
- throwaways885 5y ago
  Americans really do get the short end of the stick. Having to pay full whack to fund healthcare development while single payer systems just take the result at bargain basement prices. The only solution is to fund basic science research directly and remove the perverse incentives, but (as an outsider) it seems America does not have the political will to do anything so bold right now.

Smaug123 5y ago

Re ventilators specifically, remember that we had basically no treatment for severe Covid last March. The best we could do was sedate you, force air into your lungs, and hope for the best. Now we know that dexamethasone helps in severe cases, we have monoclonal antibody treatments, and generally we are better able to treat someone who would have needed a ventilator if we'd treated them last March. In general, I'm with the Tyler Cowen thought bubble: whatever we spent on actual treatments which didn't work out, it wasn't enough. Some of your criticisms are pretty incontrovertible. The Less Wrong zeitgeist in April 2020 (perhaps even earlier) was that surface cleaning was dubious - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/riB8m9PBvXJziFYMv/on-covid-19-superspreader-events-in-28-countries-critical https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/riB8m9PBvXJziFYMv/on-covid-1... - much like they were extremely early on the "loss of taste and smell" train (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/march-coronavirus-open-thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ACyGvQchWzGjGkKgS/march-coro...).

nradov 5y ago
The latest research indicates that Methylprednisolone is more effective than Dexamethasone. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0885066621994057 https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0885066621994057 https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/math-plus-protocol/ https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/math-plus...
- Smaug123 5y ago
  Even better! (I merely stated two treatments I knew of which were found to be effective well after the point when we were making ventilator-related decisions. I am doubtless unaware of many more.)

jnwatson 5y ago

In my kid's high school (in Virginia, US), we have detailed contact tracing for all positive COVID tests. Contact tracing is done, and it seems to be done fairly thoroughly here.

skybrian 5y ago

Another example: instead of contact tracing with PCR tests, skip the tracing part and have everyone regularly take much cheaper antigen tests a couple times a week. As a result of the lack of vision, there was no urgency in the US to approve over-the-counter antigen tests and they only became available in pharmacies last week.

cameronh90 5y ago
We are doing that in the UK and it's pretty controversial, with many credible medical/epidemiology experts saying it's a bad idea. One risk is people assuming a negative test means they don't have covid. Personally I think they're a good idea, but it really depends on people understanding and following the guidance. The tests are not overly simple to administer.

fossuser 5y ago

The Bluetooth contact tracing would have been amazing, the design was smart, privacy preserving, and worked. The issue was a few things: - Opt-in instead of opt-out - People (even those on HN) not understanding how it worked and loudly and wrongly stating that it was a privacy nightmare. See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25629304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25629304 Unfortunately this lead governments and others to just buy data from brokers/3rd party app collectors and such that are not privacy preserving. A pretty frustrating situation.

cactus2093 5y ago
Completely agree with this. And the opt-in problem was twofold, you needed to opt in to receive notifications (and in California this option wasn't even available until like 6 months after the frameworks were available) and also needed to remember to manually upload your result to the system after testing positive. The testing centers should have been asking for people's contact tracing id info and they should have been the ones reporting results into the system. (They already have your full name/contact info when you book an appointment, and the contact tracing id is anonymous, so again this is not sacrificing your privacy any further). It seems like a major factor in why this idea was never taken seriously by governments was that professional contact tracers are still using the playbook from 70 years ago from the polio era where the only thing you try is cold calling people's home phones. The public health field seemed entirely uninterested in technological solutions, even though it seems incredibly obvious that these could have had massive benefits over the old fashioned way of doing things. As with several other things that happened over the course of this pandemic, I really just can't wrap my head around why the "experts" were so willing to just let half a million deaths rack up in the US rather than trying any new ideas. I would be interested to read more about contact tracing now though, and if any of them have changed their mind by this point.
- fossuser 5y ago
  Agreed - the cold calling was a joke and only really started after community transmission was super widespread anyway.
deleted 5y ago

pvorb 5y ago

> [...] and the chemicals used in some places destroyed a bunch of furniture. and several throats due to the excellent advice of a smart person.

toast0 5y ago

> Ventilators were the critical thing until we realized they were a very sub optimal treatment. Ventilators and ICU beds are the shortages people are/were talking about, but the real issue is staff to operate the ventilators and care for the people in the ICU beds. You can work to quickly manufacture more equipment and it was done, but training people to do ICU nursing isn't fast; especially when in-person learning is inadvisable. Even if you train up non-ICU nurses to do ICU nursing, you need to train replacements for what they were doing (or go without). We don't have a lot of spare nursing capacity, especially when there is near-worldwide excess demand.

mdoms 5y ago

Just because something didn't work in USA doesn't mean it "didn't pan out". Contact tracing has been used to track down contacts very rapidly in my country and presumably several others.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Contact tracing would have worked if there wasn't an exponential amount of community spread in the US compared to other countries.

yosito 5y ago
It would be interesting to see a metric for which countries did well with contact tracing and which didn't. Many countries tried it, and gave up. Some countries tried it and succeeded. A few countries didn't try at all.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

People wouldn't even wear masks, even more wouldn't have had a "government tracker" willingly in their pocket whether it not it was innocuous and anonymous or not.

s1artibartfast 5y ago

I am personally convinced that US contract tracing results were suppressed. Massive amounts of data was collected and I believe it was possible to compile data from it about the situations and activates where transmission was known to occur. My guess is that the data could be used to argue against the public health policies of the same organizations that were collecting it. I looks forward to some of the data analysis released in the coming years.

rodgerd 5y ago

> Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. People informing their fiends/family “hey I just got Covid you should probably test/isolate” was what practically can make a difference. Contact tracing has worked superbly in Australia and New Zealand. The fact that the US fucked things up completely doesn't mean that they were worthless techniques; rather than the US didn't want to stop people dying badly enough to make proper use of them.

wolverine876 5y ago

> It’s a little surprising how much effort went into things early in the pandemic that didn’t pan out. It is? We were dealing with an unknown disease. > Official contact tracing in the US is a complete dud and had negligible impact on the spread. People informing their fiends/family “hey I just got Covid you should probably test/isolate” was what practically can make a difference. What is this based on? Contact tracing in the US wasn't executed much, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have had a large impact. I don't regularly exercise, therefore exercise wouldn't have a large impact?

tekknik 5y ago

> Ventilators were the critical thing until we realized they were a very sub optimal treatment. The ventilators kept people alive long enough to allow their immune system to take over and fight the virus. When you have a severe respiratory illness you will likely need a ventilator.