Has anybody seen a contact tracing application that asks for your temperature every day, and ideally also the temperatures of your household members? It’s nowhere near perfect because fevers usually happen after you’ve been contagious a few days, but it’s a Really Simple Matter Of Programming, and especially in the US where we’ve done such an inadequate job of all the rest of the epidemic management, it’s cheap, and it’s a start, and you’re more likely to get people to take their temperatures than go in for a test.
And no, these things don’t need to work 100% of the time 100% accurately. They need to be better than the current system, which is called “100% False Negatives for detecting when somebody infected walks near you.” Not everybody who’s exposed is going to get infected, but the more times you can catch it early, the better. And the more times everybody around you is wearing a mask, the more times a false negative doesn’t result in you getting sick.
Vietnam has now had residents die of COVID infections they caught in the country, but for about half the year, their incidence of that was Zero, and the cases they did have were people who’d caught the disease outside the country.
