1/ This is a longer tweet on manual contact tracing and your privacy. Many oppose using tech like bluetooth to fight COVID, arguing manual contact tracing works, it is "tried & true" and has none of the privacy concerns that tech raises. But are those claims true? 2/ Manual contact tracing at the scale to fight COVID has never been done in the US. You can't hire, train and deploy enough people to research and trace fast enough all the contacts. There is not a trained workforce sitting idly by to do the job yet time is of the essence.

1) A Quick Historical footnote on Privacy and Pandemics: The 1916 Polio epidemic in Brooklyn hit immigrant Italian families hard. Their part of town was called "Pigtown." The were blamed for the spread of the disease. 2) The mortality rate in NY was about 20%. NYC reported a total of 8,927 cases of polio and 2,343 deaths. The city's hospitals were overwhelmed. Nationwide, the polio epidemic affected 27,000 people in 26 states and caused about 6,000 deaths. It died out in the winter months.

1) Privacy in a time of Pandemic - even the most privacy aware people have said to me that, upon reading that someone in their community has been infected, they want to know who and everywhere they've been in the prior few days. Fear often drives bad policy choices. 2) @EFF has posted on Protecting Civil Liberties During a Public Health Crisis: eff.org/deeplinks/2020…