Covid-19 crisis
A good way to do contact tracing
There is a good way and a bad way to do contact tracing.
A good way is for the infected person to state who are they people they have close contact with during the past two weeks. The relevant agency can trace these people. This type of contact tracing makes more sense.
In Australia, they trace the people sitting next to an infected person in a flight. They do not trace all the passengers in the plane or all the people who visit the airport.
A bad and wasteful way is the one adopted in Singapore. A lot of effort is taken to record the contact tracing details of visitors to any controlled place.
This is a costly and wasteful exercise. The contact tracing details are hardly used and of no value.
We should use our resources more effectively to handle the covid-19 epidemic.
Right now, the wasteful recording of contact tracing details is taking up too much resources. They can be channeled to provide hand sanitizers at many locations and ensure that these sanitizers are refilled regularly. It can do a lot of good to prevent the spread of the virus.
The manpower can also be used for temperature scanning points to ensure that everybody is scanned at least once in three days.
We should be dealing with the actual problem, rather than waste time on paperwork.
Tan Kin Lian
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