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 availab

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.