In an alternate universe in which Covid was very rare in a population (say 5 cases in an entire city), then contact tracing might be able to push R<1 if everyon

In an alternate universe in which Covid was very rare in a population (say 5 cases in an entire city), then contact tracing might be able to push R<1 if everyone who got an exposure notification quarantined for a few days. Sure, maybe 50 people would be quarantining at a given time due to false positives (potential exposures with no infection), but that would be a fine tradeoff to protect the whole city, especially if those people were appropriately compensated for the service they would be effectively performing and the infringement on their civil rights. The number of people inconvenienced per person protected from Covid would be very small (much, much less than one). Of course, nothing of the sort happened in the US, and in a situation in which most of the population gets Covid anyway in relatively short order, the number of people getting false positive notifications per person protected from Covid was be very large, and the total benefit was very low.