Contact tracing. It’s a governmental phrase that means spying on people and keeping your information in a database. Your local health department has your information once you have tested positive with COVID-19 and they will have an employee (or approved third party) get in touch with you to find out who you have come in contact with. 

They will ask intrusive questions, get information about what you did, where you went and who you came in contact with. Then they will seek out those new people you have named and do the same with them. 

Do you have a secret boyfriend? Been to a restaurant lately? Rode the bus? Where did you get your gas? Did you go somewhere you weren’t supposed to go? Did you walk your dog past anyone? 

Where have you traveled, eaten, slept and bathed? Inquiring minds want to know. 

They’ll look at reservation logs, manifests, surveillance tapes…Tell them everything because they’ll find out anyway. 

Then when they have their list, they will harass everyone to stay home in quarantine. 

Or what? 

That’s a good question. Do they put you under a non-compliant check box where they report you to another government entity for some kind of enforcement? Who knows what kind of power the government is giving itself during this pandemic and what lengths they will go to. 

Most of the governments are saying that contacts will generally be in the form of contacts by phone. 

Generally. 

Unless you don’t answer the phone or they have the wrong number or there is some other glitch. Maybe you’re too sick to answer the phone and talk to anyone. In that case, they will show up to your door even though they know you might have COVID-19. 

Wow. That sounds like a smart idea. 

Are they going to be talking through your door or will you have to possibly open the door and talk with them? Maybe the government has this handled and the contract tracers will be dressed in a Hazmat suit, six feet from the door. 

I’m wondering what smart people came up with this plan to send contact tracers out in the public? Oh yeah. The government. 

City and state health departments are currently looking to hire around 300,000 contact tracers. And they’re paying a lot of money to hire these “professionals.” 

You don’t have to have a background in health care. You just have to have good interpersonal skills and empathy, be comfortable talking with people and (ha ha ha) understand the confidentiality issues 

around the collection of information. You also need to be persuasive in order to get people to self- quarantine. 

In some places, you can earn up to $65,000 a year. Seems like a fair price for possibly getting infected by the coronavirus and having the privilege of calling people and invading their privacy. 

California and New York especially are hiring a lot of spies and that makes sense considering that these are liberal bastions of unconstitutionality and governments who don’t believe in privacy and freedom. 

Not surprisingly, the government doesn’t have a clue about how they could actually help to stop the spread of the virus. What they need to be doing is getting list of times and locations where an infected patient has gone and make that information public on a daily basis. We know where we have gone and we’d be interested in checking the list every day. 

Truth is, the government is way beyond the point of contact tracing unless we are talking small towns with low case rates. 

None of them are working with any “patient zeros.” The horse has left the barn. They have obviously not watched any sci-fi movies. You either find the first dozen or so people and quarantine them or you’re out of luck. 

But government has never been accused of efficiency, common sense or intelligence. They just find a problem, throw money at it and then don’t solve the problem.