Most New Yorkers diagnosed with coronavirus aren't sharing contacts with tracers
PoliticoMost of the New Yorkers testing positive for Covid-19 have not given the city’s new contact tracers names of people they may have exposed, according to data released Tuesday.
The city has identified 5,347 new cases of the coronavirus since launching its contact tracing program at the beginning of June — of those, only 1,866 have disclosed contacts to the tracers, or just over a third. And only a tiny fraction have moved into the hotel rooms the city is offering for sick people to isolate themselves and avoid infecting their families at home.
Whenever someone tests positive for the virus, the city is calling them to ask who they’ve been close to for more than 10 minutes — so tracers can hunt down and test those people, and rein in the spread of the virus. Those contacts should include family members or anyone else the sick person lives with.
But most of the people reached are claiming they have no contacts at all, said Dr. Ted Long, head of the Test and Trace Corps.
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Did not know that. 
And we'd want our friends to do the same, the more we respected them, the more we'd assume they of course would.
Fotunately, criminalization of typical people who refuse to report's such an awful idea that it's not something to worry about. Epidemiologic control is focused on stopping disease. Not on punishing one-time transgressors just for the enjoyment of throwing vast resources at that instead of something that might help.
Frankly, I'm having trouble coming up with any good reasons why people wouldn't report contacts. Some, of course, would want to refuse out of general orneriness. Some idiots might regard it as "snitching" on friends from warped notions and inability to understand right and wrong. Anti-government and other paranoias, like Jews, doctors, and aliens, would of course be in play. Some religious and/or political extremists are hoping society will be destroyed; the purest motive: why would they help?
Always with us are those who automatically resent any call to put themselves out in any way, even when it costs them nothing, and refuse to "get involved," a particularly hypocritical subcategory I guess of general orneriness.
The largest number that come to my mind, though overlapping with the others, would be the kind of idiots who are spreading disease to spite Democrats. Insane as it sounds, in this bizarre era of mass sociopathy there are tens of millions of those.
self-injurious reason ever be a good one? So, mild paranoid traits are extremely common. Does that somehow make irrational and irresponsible reactions good ones?
We can ignore duty to others completely because it's also very common to deny we have any.
Instead, how about just danger to self from the virus and disastrous societal sequelae, exacerbated by a self-endangering self-protectiveness based on irrational fears and resentments? Can a self protection that refuses to protect self from real danger ever be a good reason?
Whoops, here comes my husband. Been waiting in the car. IMO, supreme selfishness argues for contact tracing just as much as extreme selflessness.
Bye.
