Contact Tracing Test Trace Isolate Coronavirus Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdowns Quarantine

Video Transcript:

Test, trace, isolate. Test, trace, isolate. Test, trace, isolate. Test, trace, isolate. Test, trace, isolate approach will only work if you and the public are willing to do what we ask of you. Earlier today, a good friend of mine and I were talking about how surprising it was that so many Americans were willing to give up their inalienable rights for a government promise of safety. Basic liberties, the right to work, to travel, to worship. Free speech, the right to attend school, to petition the government, to assemble with others. They all were completely sidelined or partially sidelined during the COVID-19 shutdowns. Officials assured us that restrictions would be short lived and only be in place until we flatten the curve. But even after we did that, and hospitals thankfully were not overrun, Blue State governors began piling on new conditions in order for states to be fully reopened again. They had complicated requirements in a New York 51 page reopening document. Michigan, then Illinois and Washington state, they seem hell-bent on keeping people immobile and scared as long as possible. And now they found a new excuse for delay. The need for hundreds of thousands of so-called contact tracers. All roads back to work, back to school, lead through testing, tracking, isolation, treatment, and vaccine. So, the most effective way to prevent infections and save lives is breaking the chains of transmission. And to do that, you must test and isolate. Countries, if they're going to be able to move away from this approach of having to lock down and shut down, if we're going to move away from that approach as a means of suppressing the virus, we have got to put in place. To public health surveillance, the isolation, the quarantine, the case finding, the detection, we've got to be able to show that we can go after the virus. Because lockdowns alone will not work. The point of this is to create a core of trained folks who are ready and able have the skills we need them to help us all through the new environment. I know a lot of you don't answer the phone when you see an unknown caller reaching in, but I implore you to answer that call. If you live outside this tri-state area, try to pay attention to what's going on here. After all, contact tracing will have to occur in other parts of the country as well. Otherwise, the virus can keep circulating in different parts of the country, which means that it could anytime readily spread to the rest of the U.S. After all, the virus is like a very bad house guest. It doesn't respect boundaries, and it is unlikely to just disappear without a trace. We want to grow our voluntary contact tracing so that we can further control and reduce the rate of spread of COVID-19 and stop outbreaks in their tracks. Getting things fixed, getting back to normal and reopening the economy will require three key things, more testing to catch outbreaks before they get out of control, contact tracing to identify anyone an infected person came in contact with, and isolation to break the chain of transmission. Test trace isolate is the mantra, and it's the tracing part where the right to individual privacy collides with the need to protect public health. You've probably heard a lot lately about contact tracing. It's this public health tool to try to stop infectious disease outbreaks. The major thrust of how we're going to control and make sure that we continue to keep this nation open is early case recognition, isolation and contact tracing. That's the fundamentals of public health. That's what we're going to do. Isolating those who are infected, contact tracing and quarantining the contacts. That's a box. You get those four things right. You can keep a virus in the box so we can come out more readily. Contact tracing is essential just as all the other guests have said. It's going to be challenging in some communities because technology is going to be important. Having smart phones where you can load apps and be able to contact people that way. In a lot of communities there's a technology gap and you won't be able to do that. So we're still going to need a small army of individuals to do the kind of investigation just to try people to have. We're tracing agents in the hundreds and hundreds of people, right? You take the test and then you trace back all the contacts. It's never been done on this scale before. This is an army of tracers that basically invest in it. Effectively what it would do is it would take some of those folks that are frankly already sidelined from AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, other service organizations like that. And it would redeploy and rescale and retrain them and it would augment them as well. And those folks would be the boots on the ground that would do the tracking and testing and tracing and hopefully even the treating in terms of anoculation and vaccination. Alongside of the already existing community support networks and the already existing professional health care. It's a good choice. The most likely person to become a case is someone who's been a significant contact of another case. And at the moment, in most parts of the world, due to lockdown, most of the transmission that's actually happening in many countries now is happening in the household at family level. In some senses, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner. So that's what I was saying previously about the transition from movement restrictions and shutdowns and stay at home orders can only be made if we have in place the means to be able to detect suspect cases, isolate suspect confirmed cases. Yeah, I trust him. Well, what TSA was to post the post 9-11 era, contact tracing is to the COVID era. It's all for our own good and protection. That's what they say. And it seems fine at first until maybe like when you're talking about TSA, an agent's hand gets a little too close to your private parts during a random screening. And then they throw away your favorite moisturizer, right? Because it's too many ounces. Would contact anybody who has tested positive to learn about their recent activities, who they may have been in contact with and ensure that they can take steps to make sure that they can stay healthy and not spread the virus any further. Find the embers and stop them out before they become a wildfire. Exactly right. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker announced the first statewide contact tracing program last month. It's grown into a thousand person team reaching hundreds of pages. Massachusetts has invested $44 million in disease detectives. It will reach at least 120,000 close contacts. All of it critical to the Oregon State University and Benton County Health Department have joined forces to provide door-to-door testing for residents in the Corvallis community. The teams have taken COVID-19 testing to your doorstep. For public health providers, this is like fighting a forest fire without seeing the fire. The plan to test 960 people over the next four weeks that adds up to just under 4,000 residents in Corvallis. The Florida and Corvallis community is created by CDC officials surveying the community. We're working with the Georgia Department of Public Health and the Department of Public Health to do a zero prevalence survey around the community in the Cab County to determine the community of transmission for one of our officials randomly selecting houses and drawing blood for antibodies and conducting a questionnaire to better understand. This week helped to test more people for COVID-19 came to people living in public housing. The Tennessee National Guard helped NDHA perform the tests and get a better picture on how the virus is affecting the community. We can't have the military show up and say come get tested. That's not going to happen. But if you have the military in their medical uniforms and their PPEs, it's a whole different story. But at least your interaction with a TSA agent is brief and limited to only when you fly. Your interaction with a COVID tracer could last for weeks if not longer. According to the AP, the practice of so-called contact tracing requires a hybrid job of interrogator, therapist, and nurse. As they try to coax nervous people to be honest, the goal to create a roadmap of everywhere infected people have been and who they've been around. That's a heavy lift. So how many of these tracers will we actually need? Health investigator Mackenzie Bray follows a script that she knows all too well. I'm just following up on your COVID-19 test results. Bray is among an army of health professionals and volunteers working as contact tracers. Some health officials estimate that as many as 300,000 contact tracers would be needed in the country to effectively mitigate the spread. Are you kidding me? 300,000? So remember I talked about how this kind of reminds me of the TSA, the creation of the TSA. Well, it's the quote experts get their way. There'll be six times more contact tracers than TSA agents. But instead of rummaging through your luggage, these contact tracers will be prying into the most intimate details of your life. Google and Apple are using technology to help track the spread of the coronavirus. The two companies want to create a tool that will let you know if you were ever in contact with somebody who tested positive. You're looking at a demonstration of a new program called Fleming. Six people will have red coloring education developed by the Israeli Cyber Intelligence firm NSO. It uses cell phone and public health data to identify where people infected with the coronavirus are and who they're coming in contact with. What you see on the screen is someone who's sick, stayed in a location long enough so that location itself is regarded as an attack. This pilot scheme because it protects the island better and it protects my at risk groups because the track tasting chip and test scheme is going to enable us to find where the virus is on the island and by looking after those people with it we can get to kill it faster and the information that we're going to give is going to provide a road map to how the app functions in the two or three weeks time when it is rolled out nationally. Where this is your passport for everything. It's a health code generated by your phone that proves your virus free and you need it to book a train ticket, get into a grocery store, even to go to a coffee shop. Even in Westport, Connecticut, police were set to deploy a drone that could monitor people's temperatures. NSO won't disclose which countries are using its software but NBC News has confirmed NSO is marketing Fleming in the US. If you're found to have been in the orbit of someone who tested positive for the virus, they could monitor your whereabouts continuously until they determine you're no longer a danger to others. Now right now it may be only for 14 days or so but what happens when the next expert tells us something different maybe next week. What about your medical information? It's very personal to you. Well according to the Tracer training program run by Johns Hopkins University that we had a producer actually sign up for today, it's required for tracers hired in New York. Your medical information will be kept confidential they say though perhaps not all of it. This is how one slide in that training program puts it. Your medical information cannot be shared with anyone else unless you agree to it but your COVID-19 test results can be shared to protect public health. Well why is that? Well according to Johns Hopkins it's because quote contact tracing programs are a public good. They can reduce illness and deaths from COVID-19. A public good again it sounds fine. Very reasonable but I thought in a representative democracy the people get to determine what is in the quote public good. Dr. Dean Xerris took us inside this COVID hotel for the most vulnerable. Hello Wendy. Wendy Results found out over the phone last week she was exposed to COVID-19 after testing positive she's now quarantined for four days. How hard is it to you wait from your family? It's very hard. Do what I'm gonna do. We cry every day. You cry every day. But she's hopeful this will protect her loved one. I got another good contact tracing. How are you guys going to handle people or families who wonder if users has stored to isolate if they want to leave their home to get groceries that maybe you said they can't do that? How will you make sure they don't? Well that's why I refer to the family support personnel. We will have attached to the families of family support person who will check in with them to see what they need on a daily basis. I have to be hearing sounds of some of the people in the rooms next door yelling and begging to be let out of the room because they're desperate for fresh air. Why are you giving me strange idea? You have no idea. They can't make people walk down in their rooms. You have to be sunshine. You have to be a man. You have to be a man. You have to be a man. You have to be a man. Not unaccountable experts at a university that receives millions of dollars in grant money from billionaires and corporate foundations. Given the enormity of the federal and state expenditures we're talking about here, it's amazing how little debate there's been about the risk to personal privacy. I'm telling you there are always going to be plenty of reasons cited by government bureaucrats or unelected technocrats to justify taking your freedoms away. They'll cite scary things like gun violence, climate change, and now of course COVID, maybe the next virus. And they'll use our fear and maybe even skewed statistics or bad modeling to manipulate the public perception. They'll find experts who insist that the harm to personal privacy is minimal and that any trade-off is worth it. They'll promise their actions will be temporary and narrowly tailored. But invariably these new programs, like what we saw after 9-11, will become permanent fixtures in American life and end up expanding far beyond their promise goals. You saw John F. Exissol. We're coming to get to go into some of these ALFs and move people out or go into family homes like in some of these when we're going into some of these homes and we have to separate an individual to isolate them. We need to make sure that they get care, that they have food, that they have support to be isolated from their home or their family. Older people on their own and then they're really suffering. I can hear people down the hallway crying and there's a woman who's hysterical and pleading to be let out and she's having panic attacks her husband's to strut those people who need blood pressure medication, cholesterol was insulin and they're calling me and they're asking for help and what to do. I think back of the creation of the FISA court, the Patriot Act, just to name a few. Next thing you know, bad actors use them as weapons against innocent people and they almost manage to undo a presidential election. The government can use a variety of tools to enforce its new normal. Using self-assessment tools is the least concerning, I think, from my personal privacy standpoint. But then there are these location devices using a variety of technological tools to monitor you. Yesterday, Google and Apple unveiled a phone app that lets you know when you've been exposed to someone who's COVID positive. In 22 countries, I've already signed on to use the app. Now, the tech giants did craft this app with user privacy in mind. We'll give them a thumbs up for that. But according to the Wall Street Journal, the entire purpose of the app is to quote help public health departments track contact between strangers. Personally, I'd take whatever privacy promises though that some of these companies are making today with a grain of salt. You have no constitutional right to endanger the public and spread the disease even if you disagree. You have no right not to be vaccinated. You have no right not to wear a mask. You have no right to open up your business. Wait, can I stop you? No right not to be vaccinated. Meaning, if they decide you have to be vaccinated, we have to be vaccinated. Absolutely. And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor's office and plunge a needle into your arm. If the vaccine is not in the Constitution, I think we're going to have a vaccine by the end of the year. We're doing very well with the vaccine. And I will tell you something I just literally left a meeting. We're mobilizing our military and other forces, but we're mobilizing our military on the basis that we do have a vaccine. You know, it's a massive job to give this vaccine. Our military is now being mobilized. So at the end of the year, we're going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very happy. We're going to have to agree with you. And let's take a close look at Facebook, Google and Twitter as they are censoring and issuing counter intelligence in an attempt to try and control a narrative, a narrative in which they are heavily invested, not only in hardware, but in software. And that investment is in tracking and tracing. Where that investment is taking place is right in New York. Because you see the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Vital Strategies, New York State Health Department. Tom Frieden is running the show along with his buddies from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The fact is tracking technology can have a terrible chilling effect on individual freedom and even expression. The Supreme Court noted this a few years ago in its landmark ruling to enforce location data protections. The Court and Carpenter versus the United States said detail travel and location data provides an intimate window into a person's life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. And remember those seemingly helpful COVID tracking apps are themselves windows into your life. Servers could be hacked, data stolen, and generally the data is available ultimately to anyone for theft. No right not to be vaccinated, meaning if they decide you have to be vaccinated, we have to be vaccinated. Absolutely. And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor's office and flung a needle into your arm or purchase advertisers, cyber criminals, even political adversaries, and so on. So can the government, federal or state really ensure that our data not be accessible to any of the above? Of course the answer is no. It'd be naive to think otherwise. They could perhaps mandate though that the health information only be available to health authorities. But given how wrong so many of their health experts have been lately, you really can't blame Americans who have severe reservations about trusting them with their private medical information. The fires that could be whether it's an ember or a flame, we're going to put it out. But we're not closing our country. Boom, that was Trump at his best is exactly right and it needed to be said. Because just hours before that, the president made that statement at CDC director, he strikes again, Robert Redfield. He was out sounding the alarm pushing the panic button, telling the financial times. We've seen evidence that the concerns it would go south in the southern hemisphere like the flu are coming true. And then when the southern hemisphere is over, I suspect it will reground itself in the north. Consider the source. Why should we trust the CDC at all on this? Last week, we exposed their history of political bias. And frankly, they've been bungling the response of COVID from the beginning. It started with their testing deficiencies. And now this, the Atlantic reporting that the CDC is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons. Which now means it's now way harder to actually gauge how much our testing capacity has improved and it's improved quite a bit. Joining me now is Dr. Scott Jensen, physician and Minnesota state senator Dr. The CDC, when people hear the CDC, that acronym, I think they want to think it's like the good housekeeping seal of approval. Everything they say is accurate. But what's really going on? Well, the CDC has been around since the 1940s and its original intent was to help against malaria, but through steady mission creep, they've become something they were never intended to be. And for certain, it's a political organization. And as you mentioned, they bungled the testing right out of the blocks. But what was even worse than that was once they realized they bungled it. Instead of looking to someone who was already moving forward and getting some help, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant made the comment that they should have just swallowed their pride, reached out to Germany and used their testing. But instead, the CDC kept us mired down. So we got way behind right out of the blocks. And then seven weeks ago, we had the CDC mushing things in regards to how to code death certificates. And now we find out that unconscionably, they're mixing serology tests with PCR tests. And this is, this has no place in their work because these numbers are driving governor's decisions as to closing things down or opening things up. The American people need to draw a line in the sand and say, we're going to have to look at the CDC differently than we have before. Yeah, well, maybe you have to reform it or reconstituted or, but when we, when we can't even have faith in the numbers of deaths or tests that have been done, and that just erodes trust across the board. And it's a, President Trump, that's the last thing he needs right now is he is hearing Redfield out there, you know, constantly pushing the panic button just as we get a little good news. It's always no, no, no, it can't be good news. Got to take five steps backward. Now, the media, Scott, their outrage at the president just doesn't abdicate everything over to the CDC. The CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is really considered the national voice. He should do what his own advisors, what his CDC says is important. Talk about blowing up trust with the one agency we, that we as a country have had had high regard for. And that is the CDC. A few years ago, the CDC was pushing gun control, Dr. Jensen, that was there being their big effort. And now, it just become a partisan organization to a lot of us. I'm sorry, I mean, I'm sure there are good people there, but why are they surprised that people don't trust it after what happened? I think they've absolutely fractured the trust. Dr. Jensen, great to see you as always. Thanks for being with us tonight. Stayed. Yeah, no right not to be vaccinated, meaning if they decide you have to be vaccinated, we have to be vaccinated. Absolutely. And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor's office and flunge a needle into your arm. Change the idea. You have no idea. You have a people locked up in their rooms. No, when you touch you, you have a feeling. Sunshine. Yeah. You have a feeling. You have a feeling. Exorcise. The coming get ready.