All in all, alternaut's linked docs present a pretty depressing picture of the prospects of getting a handle on COVID, let alone doing so without compromising individual privacy.
Either pretty depressing or a pretty realistic picture of a very complicated circumstance with more variables unclear at this point than are clearly understood yet.....I'm not yet ready to surrender an optimistic outlook, but neither am I going to ignore the realities as they are currently understood.
I live in a rural setting where distancing protocols are easy to comply with, but next week I have to go to a major metropolitan area for a Dr appointment referral at a higher-level university medical center. I'm taking my RV to their parking lot where I can enforce safe distancing protocols without concern for outside factors....call it a lifeboat. I will be wearing my face covering when in public, maintaining safe distance guidelines, washing my hands and NOT touching my face.....and when I'm finished and go home, I will maintain my RV domicile in the driveway for the next several days (5 at a minimum) so that I mitigate the possibility of bringing an unwanted viral visitor home to my wife. We are both in the age group and health-factor demographic which has elevated risk.....and we both want to be around for a good long while yet!
There are those who consider such conservative protocols extreme, constraining and unnecessary - it is really inconvenient.....and if it were only those individuals at risk, I would say "go ahead" and expose yourself - however, the exposure is not to the individual, but to the rest of the community at large....no individual becomes infected without potentially spreading the infection to a large percentage of those they come in close contact with.....and no individual has the right to willingly and consciously expose the rest of their community to such risk as this virus presents without their consent. Calling this pandemic a conspiracy or saying it's just not true is criminal in it's potential risk to life.
Tools to manage and mitigate the risks of this pandemic are being built, but they are not going to be perfect. The joint effort to create an app which can passively produce a contact matrix electronically using existing technology is only a first step....and yes, personal privacy concerns will be a valid offsetting factor in whether that tool can be used in a free society without surrendering a freedom (at least at the current state of development). The question then becomes, what price?....and that question won't be answered here.
