[Goose]

By the way, for those who don't know what's being done on contact tracing (and so tend to think nothing is being done), I've been watching the Tuolumne County info.  In the last week they essentially tripled the number of total cases (from 8 to 22).   The county was putting up a short bit about the cases, and it was very clear they were on top of these (local woman at a big family gathering resulting in infection of her & others;  4 clusters popped up; then an out-of-area person developed symptoms at a multi-day event & went in for test & care).



I expect that sort of test, trace, isolate is going on in SCC (and throughout the country) but we just don't hear about it.

San Mateo County says they track and trace 100% of the cases in the county. If they know where all these cases are coming from, they can contain the disease. The fact we just don't hear about it is disturbing. We don't need all the gory details, but the public needs something to assure them that the County is containing this virus and we won't wake up one day back where we started, community spread and no control.
From my point of view, if each jurisdiction would publish two numbers once a week, we would know whether or not they are containing the virus. Those numbers would be the number of new cases in that period that were already contacts of previously tracked cases, and the number of people they told to quarantine. If the vast majority of the "new" cases each week are contacts of already detected cases, we are containing the disease, because those people were already quarantined when they tested positive. The number of people put into quarantine each week should be at least the same as the number of new cases. Note that the new case themselves  are not put into quarantine. They are put into isolation.  Since the tracing goes both directions, for each positive new case you hope to find the person who infected them. That person also goes into isolation, not quarantine. Since the average number of contacts is usually more than 1, an average of 1 is conservative. Normally, it will be significantly greater than that. The "at least one" is needed to indicate that some tracing is actually going on. For some reason, nobody seems willing to do publish these numbers.

[Goose]

By the way, for those who don't know what's being done on contact tracing (and so tend to think nothing is being done), I've been watching the Tuolumne County info.  In the last week they essentially tripled the number of total cases (from 8 to 22).   The county was putting up a short bit about the cases, and it was very clear they were on top of these (local woman at a big family gathering resulting in infection of her & others;  4 clusters popped up; then an out-of-area person developed symptoms at a multi-day event & went in for test & care).



I expect that sort of test, trace, isolate is going on in SCC (and throughout the country) but we just don't hear about it.

San Mateo County says they track and trace 100% of the cases in the county. If they know where all these cases are coming from, they can contain the disease. The fact we just don't hear about it is disturbing. We don't need all the gory details, but the public needs something to assure them that the County is containing this virus and we won't wake up one day back where we started, community spread and no control.
From my point of view, if each jurisdiction would publish two numbers once a week, we would know whether or not they are containing the virus. Those numbers would be the number of new cases in that period that were already contacts of previously tracked cases, and the number of people they told to quarantine. If the vast majority of the "new" cases each week are contacts of already detected cases, we are containing the disease, because those people were already quarantined when they tested positive. The number of people put into quarantine each week should be at least the same as the number of new cases. Note that the new case themselves  are not put into quarantine. They are put into isolation.  Since the tracing goes both directions, for each positive new case you hope to find the person who infected them. That person also goes into isolation, not quarantine. Since the average number of contacts is usually more than 1, an average of 1 is conservative. Normally, it will be significantly greater than that. The "at least one" is needed to indicate that some tracing is actually going on. For some reason, nobody seems willing to do publish these numbers.