Comparing it to the alternative of health professionals doing contact tracing, in addition to the fact that it's vastly better at its job, it would also be a privacy-protecting system.
Say that I have close contact with a co-worker named Joe on a regular basis. I get diagnosed positive. I don't have Joe's phone (it's not all that normal to exchange personal phone numbers with co-workers). So now I'm asking sick time from my manager John and talking with someone performing contact tracing. Now this health professional has to play phone tag to get Joe's number, and John will obviously put 2-and-2 together and know what happened. So will others in the phone tag.
> On a population scale, an asymptomatic superspreader is likely far more expensive than somebody not going to work for a few days until they got tested so it could/should be addressed by policy makers. If your politicians can't figure out how to make mandatory sick leave happen during an active pandemic I'm not convinced a contact tracing app is the problem.
That's pretty much the endpoint of the discussion.
We've already established there is no magic bullet for this. Even the most promising therapeutics, in the best case, will not return us to normal by the fall. Source - https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic-Innovation
We are counting on vaccines, but the timelines already have a huge amount of optimism backed into them. We can hardly stand 18 months more of this, but yet rollout may drag on longer than that if the trials encounter setbacks.
If we don't ramp up and improve testing then we're screwed. No matter what else happens, that banishes us to isolation with no end in sight. Thankfully, testing is one area where we can and probably will come up to snuff in the summer months. That doesn't get us back to normal or normal-ish.
The app would be a tremendously powerful tool. If you take this seriously, then you will value even meager tools that help move the needle in the right direction. People still holding out hope for that magic bullet are delusional, and they need to wake up to reality.
Say that I have close contact with a co-worker named Joe on a regular basis. I get diagnosed positive. I don't have Joe's phone (it's not all that normal to exchange personal phone numbers with co-workers). So now I'm asking sick time from my manager John and talking with someone performing contact tracing. Now this health professional has to play phone tag to get Joe's number, and John will obviously put 2-and-2 together and know what happened. So will others in the phone tag.