Covid Masks, Infection Rates, and Contact Tracing

The news says, “Biden intends to issue a Covid-19 national mask mandate, with major ramp-up in testing and contact tracing.”

Masks

With cold weather coming on, I might actually enjoy wearing a mask. I’ll use it instead of my scarf.

Testing

Nobody has made the connection for me that more testing yields less sickness. The virus doesn’t care if you know where it’s at. The best I can see is if it gives data for regional decision making. Not sure how that matches with proposed national mandates that treats everybody as one aggregate group need one aggregate rule, apparently turning a blind eye toward contextual data.

Ask New York Major Cuomo about shutting schools because the aggregate rate went about 3%, while school rates were less than 1/2 of a percent.  Politicians are not generally good consumers of statistics and scientific data.

This reminds me of one other retrovirus: HIV – your test results are mandatory reported to the government.  Strange that there are only a handful of retroviruses that cause harm to humans and now Covid-19 (SARS CoV-2) counts among them.  Do a Google search with the term “retroviruses that harm humans”.

Contact Tracing

Health care workers call it Contact Tracing. Because they have no experience in other professional communities, they don’t recognize what they propose. It goes by other names in military circles. It is the intelligence data to do pattern of life analysis or Social Network Analysis. It’s what allowed the United States to take out Osama bin Laden and every other major bad guy since then. In oppressive regimes, it’s just call State Surveillance. Wikipedia explains, “It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes.”

Recent Senate hearings show it manifests as social media analysis that Facebook and Twitter do to shut down or suspend your social media posts because you communicate or link to too many other people they don’t like – mostly because they also are linked to someone else – who is linked to someone else, and so on.  Where does this go? Instead of taking down a person, the agency exerting power is able to take down entire groups of people and ideologies with one swipe.

Americans seem to support doing Contact Tracing against terrorists intent on attacking the common good of America.  I’m not sure doing this en-masse against the citizenry is an American value.

My conclusion:  I don’t want to be contact traced by you, because a rose by any other name…