The Dangers of Contact Tracing

Contact Tracing basically is the process of interviewing a proven infected individual and assessing the others whom this infected individual may have come in contact with and then mandating testing of that individual or even worse mandating a quarantine even with a negative test.

Here are some problems:

1. The time frame from infection to testing may be two to four weeks. Infection occurs and may persist for a time period without symptoms. Then symptoms start. Then they get worse. Then the person seeks a test. It takes a week for the test to be scheduled. Then a week to have the results.

2. How many people did that person contact? What is a contact? We are now relying on the memory perhaps of a hospitalized patient under severe duress. Names may be give erroneously.

3. The contact tracer then makes up a list of potentially very uncertain names. These people are now subject to a variety of sanction with no due process.

4. Being now placed as a "contact" makes a person and perhaps even that person's contacts, targets for State control. Loss of freedom with no due process. Denial of Constitutional Rights.

5. Contact tracing in this environment is highly problematic. This is unlike AIDS, where a "contact" had a specific characteristic. Here a "contact" could be merely a "ship passing in the night", a name that the infected patient throws out and even a name that the tracer thinks should be in the pool. The process has no safeguards, it is a pure autocratic step leading to the destruction of all our Constitutional Rights. We are "guilty" period, we cannot even "prove" ourselves innocent. Just think of what damage $25 per hour tracers can inflict on society. But one guesses they are "essential".

Techniques like this were used by the Soviets and Nazis. False reporting could be used to seek some retribution, to be used by the testers who one would assume have immunity. There would be no remedy, no habeas corpus, just denial of all rights. Unfortunately no one is speaking of this step. Perhaps if the Federal Government gave some modicum of thought to how this could explode in unfettered powers we could remedy it before it becomes anarchy.