Covid-19 crisis How to use the contact tracing data

Several tens of million dollars are spent each month to collect contact tracing data. This is my estimate of the wage cost of the "social distancing ambassador" that are employed at several tens of thousand tracing points, i.e. entrance of malls, supermarkets and business outlets.

I suspect that the contact tracing data is not used for the purpose of locating the people that might have been in contact with an infected person. If the infected person has visited location X, should all the other people who visited location X on the same day be approached? 

Some people argued that it will be difficult to locate the thousands of people that might be captured in the database.

I agree.

But if this is the case, why are we collecting the contact tracing data in the first place? Why are we spending (actually wasting) tens of million dollars monthly on this exercise, when the data cannot be used?

Actually, we do not need to be locating thousand people at each location visited by the infected person.  We can narrow down to the people who were in the same tracing point within a time interval of (say) 10 minutes.

This will reduce the potential contacts considerably and make the follow up tracing easier to handle.

If the mobile phone of the traced person is available, a SMS message can be sent to notify that person. For example - there was an infected person at (name of tracing point) at (time). You were there at that time. Please call XXXXXXXX to get further instructions.

When the traced person respond, they can be advised to be on quarantine and to visit a testing center to get a covid-19 test.  I hope that the people in charge implement this follow up measure immediately.

Tan Kin Lian
 

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