another interesting thing is that the traditional way to do contract tracing involves interviews – often phone calls to people to discuss where they’ve been and when.
only, you need to hire a lot of people to do the interviews, and i guess nobody is looking for work right now… /s
to me… so far… phone based contact tracing seems a bit like electronic voting. sexy and exciting because we are supposed to be living in the future, while the reality is the old school pen-and-paper methods are probably still best.
the us government though – and maybe the general public – would rather give a few private companies big bundles of cash for developing something tech-centric and fragile vs. giving a bunch of individuals each a small amount of cash for doing something routine and reliable.
somewhat related: the supreme court is going to be doing arguments by phone.
whomever thought to use the phone instead of something like zoom deserves plenty of praise imo. reliable and well tested, with no special hardware or training needed.
