Probably.
I would say that depends on the overall strategy.
If pre-symptomatic people infecting others is a big issue, then it's probably worth the cost of quarantining folks who display no symptoms until you are sure they aren't sick.
Obviously that means you quarantine a lot of people who don't later get sick.
That sounds draconian, but its a lot better than lockdowns.
You may be misunderstanding the purpose of contact tracing?
It's not to guess whether a patient you have is infected. It is to find the people that patient has infected before those infect more people.
If things are being run properly:
1. Someone shows up with the disease. (Tests positive, or clinical.)
2. You find their contacts, either by app or interview or both.
3. You tell those contacts to quarantine, hopefully before they've become infectious, breaking onward spread.
4. If they test negative and don't display symptoms, they stop quarantine.
Unless you mean to test everyone every day? Sounds good, but then you need way more tests than countries have been able to make so far, and they have to be very sensitive and specific too, even before someone is infectious.
Most of his concerns (false positives, false negatives) also apply to contact tracing done by humans, which he advocates at the end of his article.
If a medical professional interviews you about your contacts, you have to remember who they were. If you forget someone, or didn't know their name, that's a false negative. Someone you report you had coffee with, but who doesn't get the disease, is a false positive.
Apps have different limitations, and need adoption to be useful, and that's a problem societies will have to consider. There's also legit privacy concerns.
But the very broad argument made in that post is silly.
You just don't need to stop every transmission to stop the disease. Even stopping 70%, via a range of measures, is about enough. You can tolerate some errors.
> Accusing it of leading to the things you talked about is a non sequitur.
I didn't say the replication crisis lead to bad incentives. I cited it as evidence bad incentives exist.
> But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars
I didn't say remotely that.
Academics have incentives to make their work sound overly impressive, and many are playing this game. That doesn't mean every grant writer is a pathological liar, but it's very naive to think they aren't incentivised to oversell findings, and many do.
>I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims.
I should have chosen my words more carefully; we can probably find 1000s of academics to dispute a lot of perspectives on academia.
> are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career.
So, leaving aside criticism of any particular field, and to take just one pretty big cross-discipline trend, there's this 'replication crisis' thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
(wiki links to plenty of reputable sources).
I find it difficult to reconcile that with the idea that incentives to over-inflate claims were 'basically absent from anyone with a career'.
Maybe we think everyone was just really bad at statistics?
If pre-symptomatic people infecting others is a big issue, then it's probably worth the cost of quarantining folks who display no symptoms until you are sure they aren't sick.
Obviously that means you quarantine a lot of people who don't later get sick.
That sounds draconian, but its a lot better than lockdowns.