This piece comes to you from the mostly coronavirus-free shores of Australia. But the virus is still not eliminated; various places can have an extended run of virus-free days, which can then turn into weeks and months, before the virus suddenly comes back.
There is no better example of this than the reemergence of COVID-19 in New Zealand[1] back in August, after the nation went 100 days[2] without the virus and was widely considered to have eliminated it.
At the time of writing, South Australia just left[3] lockdown[4] after a surge in cases, despite the state shutting its borders to places such as New South Wales and Victoria, and only having handfuls of cases reported each day, if any were reported at all, since April.
According to the recent National Contact Tracing Review[5] [PDF], the takeaway lesson from 2020 is to throw the kitchen sink at outbreaks when they appear.
"In the event of an outbreak, every effort should be made to go hard and go early," the review said.
The way to suppress a surge in cases is to make sure those with the virus can have their recent close contacts traced, thereby getting those identified into quarantine and tested. This is in the hopes that the virus can be prevented from spreading further into the community. Key to all of this is having quick access to data.
For contact tracers, the first stop is asking people where they have been, but as we all know, the human mind is far from perfect. And this is before even considering the task of identifying random people who happened to be in a venue with a positive case.
Enter initiatives