Contact Tracing, Key to Reining In the Virus, Falls Flat in the West

Tracing is seen as a vital tool to avoid lockdowns and open economies, but that requires a robust system, widespread rapid testing and public trust. All are lacking in the West.

By Benjamin Mueller from London @ NYTimes.com, Oct.3

[....] Despite repeated vows by Western nations to develop “world-beating” testing and tracing operations, those systems have been undone by a failure of governments to support citizens through onerous quarantines or to draw out intimate details of their whereabouts. That has shattered the hope of pinpoint measures replacing lockdowns and undermined flagging confidence in governments.

Beholden to privacy rules, Western officials largely trusted people to hand over names to contact tracers. But that trust was not repaid, in large part because governments neglected services that were crucial to winning people’s cooperation: a fast and accurate testing system, and guarantees that people would be housed, fed and paid while they isolated [....]

Take off those rose-colored glasses: