Contact Tracing has been done in the U.S. for many decades. Most counties in the U.S. have health departments that perform Contact Tracing for TB and other disease outbreaks. Unfortunately the size and scope of COVID overwhelmed the existing health department efforts and no new funding or staffing was provided to properly scale.
You have used South Korea as an stellar example of contact tracing. The US doesn't have anything like contact tracing that is being done in South Korea. Are you misleading intentionally? The contact tracing being that was implemented in South Korea would clearly violate HIPAA. Therefore, the contact tracing that was utilized in South Korea is illegal in the US. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30251-X/fulltext South Korea, China, and Singapore have successfully used digital contact tracing to control the spread of COVID-19, often putting public interest above individuals' right to privacy. Despite initial enthusiasm for this approach in the USA, Israel, and Europe, privacy concerns and technical issues inhibited uptake of digital contact tracing, and recent attempts to stem the first wave of SARS-COV-2 infections failed. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00305/full Too Much Information: Assessing Privacy Risks of Contact Trace Data Disclosure on People With COVID-19 in South Korea Results: It was found that most of the contact trace data showed the gender and age of the patients. In addition, it disclosed significant places (home/work) ranging across different levels of privacy risks in over 70% of the cases. Inference on sensitive information (hobby, religion) was made possible, and 48.7% of the cases exposed the patient's social relationships. In terms of regional differences, a considerable discrepancy was found in the privacy risk for each category. Despite the recent release of government guidelines on data disclosure, its effects were still limited to a few factors (e.g., workplaces, routine behaviors). Discussion: Privacy risk assessment showed evidence of superfluous information disclosure in the current practice. This study discusses the role of “identifiability” in contact tracing to provide new directions for minimizing disclosure of privacy infringing information. Analysis of real-world data can offer potential stakeholders, such as researchers, service developers, and government officials with practical protocols/guidelines in publicizing information of patients and design implications for future systems (e.g., automatic privacy sensitivity checking) to strike a balance between one's privacy and the public benefits with data disclosure.
@gwb-trading https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00740-y South Korea is reporting intimate details of COVID-19 cases: has it helped? Extensive contact tracing has slowed viral spread, but some say publicizing people’s movements raises privacy concerns. When a person tests positive, their city or district might send out an alert to people living nearby about their movements before being diagnosed. A typical alert can contain the infected person’s age and gender, and a detailed log of their movements down to the minute — in some cases traced using closed-circuit television and credit-card transactions, with the time and names of businesses they visited. In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet and whether or not they wore a mask. Even overnight stays at ‘love motels’ have been noted.
There is already an entire thread dedicated to Contact Tracing and privacy in the U.S. You can go look at that thread to find much more information about contact tracing rules, background and requirements in the U.S.
Some FYI One of my brothers who lives in Arizona has Covid, so does his wife. He's 66 and fit, former marathon runner. He is on day 10 and just now "feeling alive". Told me it's a serious ass kicker if you have full symptoms. His wife is on day 14 and now pretty much symptom free. She too was very sick. Really high fevers in the 103 range. He told me it is like a cycle every day. Wake up drenched in sweat, fever breaks a little, builds all day and by evening you wanna die. Gets worse day by day for about 7 days. I guess it either breaks by then or you break. He believes he got it at work from another idiot coworker who came in sick. Crazy part his wife showed symptoms first. 4 days later he had symptoms, got tested and showed negative. Once again demonstrating these tests are for shit. As he got worse tested again 2 days later and was positive. It's no mystery that this will kill the very elderly and those in poor health to begin with. Bottom line, if you are sick, stay home.
This is the big issue why many of us keep saying stop focusing on the mortality rate. If you get it you could surive but get shit kicked for 3 - 4 weeks and your description is the same as my two different neighbors. Imagine if it spreads unchecked and millions more get that sick and keep spreading it. Does not mean we should go in 4 month lockdowns and shut everything but even minor health requirements throw people's panties in a bunch and the spread keeps growing. WIth the flu when you feel sick you are contagious...you stay home and in bed. With COVID many people don't realize they have it and go out like nothing is wrong and spread it or they purposely go to events with hundreds of people and refuse to follow any rules.
I guess that's the big question, are these types, mostly or entirely symptom free people a substantial source of the spreading? I don't know. What I do know, in my purely anecdotal observation, is in every single person I know who has had it they are certain they came in contact with someone who was sick, mostly in hindsight, but none the less they could place the occurrence. Of course this does not mean asymptomatic people aren't some of the cause, it just seems to me that someone with symptoms is far more contagious. Who knows?