[nomadking]

Originally Posted by jfman

Italy didn’t have contact tracing. We abandoned it because it was too hard/too expensive and we didn’t screen those coming into the country.

Nice to selectively quote Jenny Harries though, someone who if she told me the time I’d check my watch. Conflicting messaging on face masks, contact tracing, etc. I come back to the question I routinely ask how many people need to die before we accept that our scientists aren’t “world leading” in this field? Worth noting she said that as we went into lockdown - contact tracing less appropriate when you can only infect your own household.

This doesn’t detract from the fact it’s necessary going forward for this to work or we are back into lockdown with the emergency brake.

Italy DID have contact tracing.
From article of March 12th.

To add to the burden, hospitals in Italy depend on medical personnel to try to trace the contacts that people who test positive have had with others. One doctor in Bologna, who asked not to be named, said he had spent a 12-hour day tracing people who had been in contact with just one positive patient, to ensure those who next need testing are found.
“You can do that if the number of cases remains two to three,” the doctor said. “But if they grow, something has to give. The system will implode if we continue to test everyone actively and then have to do all this.”

I WASN'T being selective. It's just happens to be in the SAME article as the other quote in the post. Same as this one in the SAME article.

March 12: Contact tracing and widespread community testing is abandoned as the Government moves into the "delay" stage of its coronavirus plan, with England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty saying it is "no longer necessary for us to identify every case."

Any tracing, lockdown, etc will never work in the UK, as there are a huge number of idiots ignoring it all.

Even in South Korea, tracing is having it's problems, as I've previously highlighted.

More than 100 cases have been linked to nightlife venues in the South Korean capital, and on Saturday, Seoul ordered all clubs and bars to temporarily close.
The cluster has caused alarm in South Korea, which was among the first countries outside of China to deal with a large-scale coronavirus outbreak. In recent weeks, however, authorities had begun loosening restrictions as case numbers fell.
...
Although all three venues linked to the cluster asked for customers' full names and phone numbers on arrival, the city has been unable to contact almost 2,000 club-goers -- meaning they either avoided the calls or gave a false number, Seoul's mayor Park Won-soon said Monday.
The city has had to employ other measures to track them. Using phone signal tower records, the city found that 10,905 people were in the vicinity of the clubs in the nightlife suburb of Itaewon between April 24 and May 6. Authorities have texted them all, saying they should get tested. Officials have also used credit cards to track almost 500 people, who have been asked to get tested and self-quarantine.

The authorities, with the backing of of 8,600 police officers, are also trying identify people from CCTV footage in the clubs.
...
About 35,000 people have been tested in relation to the club cluster. The number of new daily cases nationally reached 29 on Thursday, 20 of which were tied to Itaewon. Infections had been under 20 for the previous three weeks.

Now extrapolate that to all the major towns and cities in the UK. Never, ever going to work. Even if the extreme measures the authorities in South Korea are allowed to take, were allowed to be used in the UK.

The future(15th June) legal requirement for face masks or coverings on public transport is going to be fun to watch. Hardly anyone follows that at the moment.