> Covid19 would also be over if people with symptoms would just stay home.

No it wouldn't. One of the things that makes SARS-CoV-2 such a problem is that people get contagious long before they show symptoms. Similarly to for influenza and the common cold, many people get contagious without ever developing symptoms.

More than anything I suspect this is a result of allowing so much unfiltered spam calls. If you only get one unexpected, unknown call a month you will almost always answer it. If you get three a day you will almost never answer it.

We are allowing private businesses and scammers to steal the “commons” of our societal attention. We are doing a very poor job of keeping useful communications channels open: almost every communication medium people rely on for important information gets cluttered with must-ignore spam, making it decreasingly likely an important message is actually received.

I'm now wondering if it was an attempt at contact tracing. Had they simply stated what they wanted in the message I would have been pretty likely to call them back myself or answer a later call.

I have no idea where they got my cell phone number from, but the whole thing seems poorly handled at best. Anyone with legitimate business will state the nature of that business and allow for a return call. There's just so many solutions to this problem but nearly zero aligned with incentives.

Yep. That was probably about COVID. Health privacy laws prohibit even the vague mention of a condition. The caller has no way of knowing if they have the right phone number, and the last thing you want is "Attention, Rando McUltrarunner at 42 Crustacean Crest Drive, Cleveland, Ohio! You have been infected with COVID! Run, don't walk to your nearest testing facility!" on some stranger's voicemail. Or worse, "We are following up to see if you're doing well after your abortion" ending up on the voicemail or texting app of a 15-year-old girl whose parents might have access to her phone.

Source: Recently completed my company's mandatory annual HIPAA training.

It's not IT-grade authentication, but for wetware it works.

Your doctor's office can do it because you probably have an existing patient relationship, and you already filled out that paperwork on your first visit.

But in the situation of a cold-calling contact tracer, you haven't signed anything at all, so all they can say is "This is the health department and we want to talk to you."

But it would be a good idea nonetheless, it only requires to be accompanied by a serious information campaign preparing first time receivers for the surprise.

No clue how widespread this is, but I can't exactly blame people for assuming any call or voicemail they get is a scam, there are so many out there.

I can, of course, listen to every voicemail, but that's not much better than just picking up the phone when I get a spam call.

So basically the only reason I check my voicemail is to get rid of the notification on my phone

I'm sure there are bills in the works, but those same bills are likely bundled along with completely unrelated nonsense.

Of course, you may not be comfortable with giving Google access to this data...

I actively turned my voicemail off completely.

There is simply no-one who I want to talk to who would choose to leave me a voicemail if I don't answer.

Yep. I never answer unrecognized numbers anymore, and nobody I've talked to about it does, either.

Welcome to what society looks like when social trust declines. It will keep getting worse unless and until people discover that the commons actually matters and is more than something to scam and find some way to parasitically monetize.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/less-than-half-in-singapore-wi...

Viral Load Peaks before symptom offset.

> Available evidence from contact tracing reported by countries suggests that asymptomatically infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms. A subset of studies and data shared by some countries on detailed cluster investigations and contact tracing activities have reported that asymptomatically-infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms.

http://www.emro.who.int/health-topics/corona-virus/transmiss...

Agree with the main thrust of the point but if everyone did stay home for 14 days you may well eradicate the virus. Problem of course that its economically/socially/medically impossible to facilitate a complete 14 day lockdown.

This would not be possible. There are at least several species of animals (mikes, civets, and bats) than can transmit this virus. We would need to quarantine and test, or kill, each and every one of these animals to be sure we eliminate this virus, or else it will eventually make its way back to humans.

My opinion, based on what I read, is that this will be a bit of a scourge until such time as enough people have immunity from either catching it or getting vaccinated.

Over time, as this new coronavirus makes its way through the human population, the experts it to become less virulent in general and/or appear less often. [0]

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...

I also wonder how effective the vaccine is at preventing its receivers from even reaching that asymptomatic but already contagious stage. If "90%" is just "90% less reach symptomatic stage" then the percentage of receivers that are prevented from reaching contagiousness could be much lower.

This would basically mean that the virus is almost guaranteed to become endemic despite vaccination (unless another vaccine also removes the contagious stage quite well) and that everyone who doesn't get a vaccine will eventually test their immune system against the virus.

Natural immunity often follows a similar pattern. After a while you become susceptible to a light reinfection but the immune system will be in a very good position for a quick - but not instantaneous - victory on its second encounter with the virus. Under those circumstances, herd immunity effects fail to realize unless the first wave is so lightning fast that it fizzles out before the immune systems of early survivors (or the similarly vaccinated) fall back into standby mode.

1) When I did try to install it said I need to update to a new OS, meaning my five year old phone likely wasn't good enough. 2) My local app doesn't provide alerts to me rather it alerts government contact tracers who today stated that they are only responding to alerts regarding medical/care home workers. I am neither. 3) My phone is not with me at work, the place where I interact with the most people by far, rendering the entire scheme basically useless.

But yes, I would get a vaccine in a heartbeat.

I don't think that's correct. Pre-symptomatic phase is supposed to be about 2-3 days. I wouldn't describe that as 'long' before they show symptoms.

In the US, people are going to work (or other events) WITH positive test results. Some because they won't get paid otherwise, others because they want to make a political statement, and some because they're ... well, I dunno why...

So, yes, even having people stay home after a positive test would be helpful, because currently, they aren't even doing that.

Some health departments have taken it upon themselves to arrest people that won’t sign documents.

It’s like HOA battles, except now you can be put in jail on a whim.

Even being an common case, and will likely be overturned in courts, it’s just too risky.

Which health departments, what documents, and how many people?

And how did they get arrest powers?

http://www.wvih.com/wp1/index.php/2020/07/19/couple-on-house...

"Some health departments have taken it upon themselves to enforce quarantine on people that just tested positive." doesn't really inspire the same kind of outrage.

[citation needed]

But yes, it does require having few enough infected people to make it feasible, and places like the US and most of Europe are waaaaay beyond that point now.

If we could get high compliance with isolation of positives, the US/Europe could use mass testing to "reset" without lockdowns. Test all of Michigan across a couple days and you will identify a significant portion of the infected. Then do Wisconsin. Encourage people to limit travel during those periods and so on.

You wouldn't get to 0 in one cycle, but it would hammer the transmission rate.

For better or worse [1], complying with mass government orders is simply not part of the collective American psyche.

1. it still remains to be seen if this individualism and distrust of government is one of America’s greatest strengths, or its future downfall

I'd prefer not to get Covid19, but the real worrying thing about it is the potential for a worse disease. Say it's almost as transmissible but much more deadly. How will we respond?

I'm sure many people would do more to protect themselves, but I wonder how deadly it would have to be for some people, and how deadly would it have to be to make community minded cooperation the obvious path (this is a reasonable description of mask wearing…).

https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/slovakias-second-r...

That is unlikely to be true. There are asymptomatic super spreaders. The fact that R0 is currently hovering around 1 is that society has greatly reduced contacts. Even in areas where social distancing is a mere suggestion, most people are not behaving completely normally (a good thing). Flights are super low, movie theater visits are super low, hotel occupancy is super low. Social distancing and contact tracing work. Better social distancing and contact tracing work better.

If only it worked that way! It doesn't, of course.

A random walk can lead anywhere in the adjacent landscape. That includes moving up in lethality without moving down in infectiousness. What you have written here is plausible-sounding nonsense; if it were true, the 1918 flu would never have occurred.

The good news is that influenza is almost pathologically mutation-prone, and coronaviruses are not.

Could you go a little deeper in this? It seems to have worked in Australia, South Korea and NZ as far as I’m aware, what am I missing?

It’s working fine again now that case numbers are negligible.

Many people are not going to say they cheated on their SOs, or went to a swing bar, or a gay pub.

> I think we can eradicate it by contact tracing.

Korea and Japan appear to have contained theirs through the use of reverse contact tracing.

The big problem in the "West" (i.e. Europe and US) is that lots of people don't engage with the contact tracing system, which makes the epidemic almost impossible to control.

Any amount of community transmission will eventually lead to an out of control epidemic, unfortunately.

Does the size of the island matter? Does the location of the island matter? What if there are multiple islands?

Look into covid numbers and you'll notice cities even in the same country that are on an island of some sort have significantly less covid numbers, such as Hawaii or Vancouver Island in Canada.

I don't see why the same strategy wasn't used in Europe or the US. Its hard to control a virus when there's a constant stream of new cases coming over the border. I suppose its way too late for that now.

The travel times quoted by that article: "London to Paris taking 2 hours 15 minutes, to Brussels 1 hour 51 minutes."

That's faster than some people's daily commutes into NYC.

The countries mentioned have had community transmission, but they use contact tracing, testing, and shutdowns to stop it.

if you say Mexico is in your definition of North America then it should include all of central america, almost all these countries have a lot of land-based trade.

In Canada we have not had any cases related to truckers, but there's a lot of them who have to do the cross-border route, as well as people who commute daily across the border. heck in Canada and the US there are a few spots where crossing the border is necessity -- the only school is in the other country, nearest hospital, the local library, a popular golf course, etc.

or places like point roberts, extremely small but extremely isolated, or Hyder, Alaska.

A primary landmass on its tectonic plate.

Plus it's connected to South America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

Australia and NZ were able to control their outbreaks (even then with great difficulty in the case of my state of Victoria AU) because the populations are much smaller and the virus was not widespread when the severity of the threat became apparent.

It was pretty bad in Victoria and it was an impressive effort to get it back down. Not many places have achieved success like that. To me the key was the population and its leaders having the will to fight.

I'm talking relative terms; our numbers were 50-100/day when they realised the problem was getting bad, and up to 700/day when we hit crisis point, but that's still lower than the figures that some U.S. and European cities had even back in March/April when the world was still yet to understand what was really going on.

And yep, I think what's happened here has been impressive, but we've had some factors in our favour that other parts of the world don't have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucero_Express

So once you're down to low levels of incidence in the community, given a robust well organised system, efficient contact tracing does prevent the virus from spreading in the community unchecked.

They have done very good at tracking and locking down the few cases that get out, even with very low mask use in the general community based on what I've seen. People were sensible when it mattered most.

I am not sure this is true. At least some articles I read attribute the successes in many Asian countries to aggressive contact tracing and quarantining. You don't ask people kindly to self-isolate, you move them to hotels and quarantine them. You don't ask them to remember their contacts, you aggressively investigate them using every source of data available.

I think an argument can be made that Europe simply got it wrong in the details. In order to find less invasive means of controlling covid that respect privacy we ended up limiting freedoms much more and for longer.

There is limited freedom during a lockdown, but a short sharp one can lead to almost complete normality soon after. Short and sharp or long and drawn out?

The drawn out option would seem a dubious freedom. My perspective is heavily skewed by being in NZ and reading US and UK news.

Because contact tracing seems to work very well at scale in Asia.

It's a cultural thing. Asian cultures vary dramatically between each other (don't mistake Koreans, Chinese, or Japanese for each other -it won't end well), but they have one thing in common: They have a real sense of every person is part of a collective. Maybe it's because most Asian societies are quite crowded.

The US, on the other hand, has a real sense of everyone is an individual, to the point of actually considering people that follow rules and norms to be "sheeple" (see "antimaskers").

Europeans seem to be in the middle.

The 5-HTR1A gene affects whether we more easily make relative versus absolute judgments. And this seems to be true for everything from the length of lines, to quality of life. The allele that is most common in East Asia makes relative judgements easier, in America it is absolute judgements that are easier.

Politically, having the relative form of the gene encourages more community thinking while the absolute encourages more individualism. This leaning holds within whatever society you're in. But when a culture is dominated by one form of the gene, it will naturally shift the entire society.

I learned this from pages 183-186 of https://www.amazon.com/Whos-Charge-Free-Science-Brain/dp/006... and I've wondered ever since how many of my opinions are reason (as it feels) versus genetics.

And yet, just like China, they have also beaten the virus. Meanwhile, Russia has failed on all counts.

The West has the laws on the books, and the legal precedent necessary to enforce them, when it comes to epidemics. What it lacks is the political will.

It doesn't matter how effective these measures are, or how bad an idea it is to let the virus run unchecked - under it's current leadership, states like Kentucky will never do what is necessary to get the virus under control, because these measures are anathema to it's current regime. And states like Washington won't either, because while those measures are not anathema to them, their governments are afraid of a backlash that will replace them.

This wasn't an inevitable outcome - nothing fundamentally stopped bipartisan cooperation on this point. Political expedience and the desire to own the libs did. Had the right not used the pandemic as an opportunity to grab power, and start a culture war, we wouldn't be where we are today.

And you can't blame the Democrats for choosing to make resistance to following best practices in disease control a wedge issue.

Don't equate the damage caused by 'a relief bill didn't pass because two parties couldn't agree on which pork could be added to it' and 'one of the parties is not following basic epidemic control practices'.

Sweden squashed their cases down from a massive peak without any lockdowns or masks, but with a social welfare system that supported anyone who felt even slightly sick to stay home

It works 'at scale' in Taiwan/Korea if by 'scale' you mean 'large country' but yes, it does not work when there are many infected, it's best suited for when there only small numbers and the government can keep a lid on that.

But that's entirely possible. Remember that countries have local agencies and national numbers are not everything.

Ontario is only 12M people, British Coloumbia 5M people and they have active contact tracing of literally every patient.

So with 90% effectiveness, the numbers will be brought way down, and in many areas, the threshold of cases will be low enough that contact tracing can be enacted.

So about the 50 people - we have to basically still maintain a degree of isolation, and that's entirely possible.

We don't need to tell the grocery store workers to 'self isolate' because someone came into the store with COVID that's already happening, those are low-risk events.

During social isolation, people should absolutely not be contacting 50 people.

So masks, basic social isolation at very least (no unnecessary contact) can remain in place.

I stayed at home even before symptoms, I infected 3 adults and my daughter in my house.

It was only luck that the adults showed symptoms like myself on day 3 and day 3 was a Sunday and my test results came back that day.

Otherwise, they woul have infected others just like I infected them, before I showed any symptoms.

AND gave up all human interaction. It is absurd to suggest that we should sacrifice civilisation for a virus

Also, we _are_ sacrificing civilization for a virus. Or at least 1.2 million people's worth of civilization…

> Or at least 1.2 million people's worth of civilization…

1.x million natural deaths with an average age of 82 years old, in the UK.

It's worked pretty well all over Asia.

Of course it helps to get the actual rate so close to 0 that the contact tracers are not overloaded

What if it has the contagiousness of covid but the long term lethality of hiv? The long term lethality would have low evolutionary pressure to be less harsh to its host as the implications only follow after many infectious years.

Is there anything fundamentally prohibiting the emergence of such a virus, or are we just lucky?

What if we get hit by a comet?

In South Korea it did. They now have very few cases and deaths in single digits per day.

It's worked in South Korea

Also, "hasn't worked at scale anywhere is false" - AFAIK it worked fairly well in South Korea, Japan, New Zeeland, China.