Elizabeth Warren Calls for ‘National Contact Tracing’ Program

Sailors annotate covid-19 symptoms Saturday during door-to-door daily medical checks aboar
Jordan E. Gilbert/Navy/AFP/Getty Images
Hannah Knudsen

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Monday called for “national contact tracing” program in response to President Trump’s call to reopen the country.

“Once again: You can’t just ‘re-open’ our economy with a tweet,” Warren said, referencing Trump’s tweets to “REOPEN OUR COUNTRY!” and “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS.”

“You need to do the work, day in and day out, to make sure that our communities can stay safe,” she continued. “And that means—to start—implementing programs like widespread testing and national contact tracing”:

Contract tracing involves monitoring and tracing the contacts of individuals who have been infected by the novel coronavirus — a method many critics view as a slippery slope and an assault on privacy.

The British government has already embraced the concept, introducing a contract tracing app, which stores user data on government servers.

As Breitbart News reported:

The app was developed by NHSX (the digital arm of the country’s socialised medical system) alongside the GCHQ intelligence agency. The app will store user data on centralised government servers rather than taking the decentralised approach advocated by Apple and Google, which are also developing a contact tracing app for other countries. Other nations in Europe including Germany, Switzerland, Estonia, Austria, and the Republic of Ireland have all opted for a decentralised system of contact tracing, in which data is stored locally on a user’s device, not sent to a central or government server.

House Democrats, meanwhile, are promoting the COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone Act (TRACE Act), or  H.R. 6666, which authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID–19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals’ residences.”

Per the proposal, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would issue $100 billion in grants to entities — including federally qualified health centers, school-based health clinics, academic medical centers, and non-profits — to conduct extensive contact tracing, which could lead workers straight to an individual’s doorstep.

“Until we have a vaccine to defeat this dreaded disease, contact tracing in order to understand the full breadth and depth of the spread of this virus is the only way we will be able to get out from under this,” Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-IL), who introduced the measure, said.

He added:

The COVID-19 TRACE Act will allow us to do this by creating a $100 billion dollar grant program for local organizations to hire, train, and pay individuals and to purchase supplies to run mobile testing units and door-to-door outreach as is safe and necessary, with special preference being given to those operating in hot spots and medically underserved communities, as well as those entities who commit to hiring from these neighborhoods.

“This is nothing but a massive government surveillance program cloaked in a cure-the-coronavirus label,” the Washington Times’ Cheryl K. Chumley said of the proposal.

Rush has rejected the strong opposition of critics, claiming that there is “nothing in this bill that will threaten anyone’s individual liberties”:

H.R. 6666, dubbed the “devil” coronavirus bill, has several well-known progressive co-sponsors, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL).

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) this month also outlined the need for “comprehensive contact tracing.” Without that and widespread testing, “consumers won’t have the confidence needed to jump-start our economy,” he warned during Friday’s Democratic weekly address.

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