Every positive you then backtrack and test everybody they interacted with. And if they interacted too recently, you assume they're infected and keep them from interacting with others.
Yes, you might miss somebody. Which is why you look at cell phone information. Everybody who they came into contact with. Privacy? Que dices? No hablo ingles.
And in some countries they'd publish the name of the infected--"have you had contact with this person?" Privacy? Prosim, nemluvim anglicky! And good luck trying to explain what you mean in ... that language
That handles the asymptomatics. Test not just any person, but those who you suspect.
This has been complicated and has holes in it. Want perfection? First become god, and right after vanquishing COVID make all the mosquitoes into pollinators and make purple martins into seed eaters. And just dispose of fire ants, they're just a plague. In fact, maybe deal with the fire ants first.
Complications? How far back to you trace? A week? Two weeks? Might not show symptoms until more than 14 after infection. And what about one woman who was found dead and whose autopsy showed COVID? She could give no information about where she went.
And then there are people who turn off their phones (or, as mine was Saturday, dead), or have burner phones.
Fortunately most complications resolve themselves. If that dead woman infected 10 people, 7 would have had symptoms and turned up that way--then had contacts traced. The other three might infect people, but they'd be caught and traced back to the asymptomatics. That makes for a lot of sick people and doesn't work if there are too many such cases. (Tracing contacts also has an exponential feature to its progression.)
Another privacy complication, though, are those who don't want to turn themselves in. The program works best if you're immediately sequestered--not with non-infected people, because then you'd do the Chris-Cuomo thing and infect others while quarantining in your basement while riding your bike outside. (It makes sense to somebody; don't ask me.) If you're a mother or the breadwinner in a family you might not want to be sequestered. That means there have to be checks for symptoms in work places--and if you have a symptom, you get reported. Remember--economic hardship pales in comparison to death.
"Snitch culture" is a sine qua non for this to work. Distrust others, distrust local health authorities, and it fails--if somebody takes the position that sheltering an infected person is like sheltering a Jew in Nazi Germany, it doesn't work. Maybe it just fails in small ways--because it would be the same as with the dead woman, just messier. As long as such cases are few in number, it can work--but such cases are costly in terms of both sickness and expense.
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