Why Are North Dakotans Not Cooperating With Contact Tracing?

Valley News Live (Fargo) is reporting that, even though there has been an uptick in positive COVID-19 cases in North Dakota, residents are not cooperating with contact tracing efforts. If you are not sure how contact tracing is supposed to work, it goes a little like this: you test positive for the virus and quarantine for 14 days (whether you're actually displaying symptoms or not), the North Dakota Department of Health contacts you, you give them information on people you have been in contact with for the past 14 days, those people test, so on and so forth.

Well, how would you ever accurately keep track of your every move in public without a little help? There is an app for that.

Remember the Care-19 app? It was created to anonymously keep track of your location in order to help you remember where you have been in case you are positive for the virus. Well, you may ALSO remember that the Care-19 app was not actually keeping your information anonymous. Whether or not the user information gathered was meant to be used maliciously or not, it is definitely unethical (at the very least) to straight up lie to the people like that. Business Insider has more in-depth information on the Care-19 app information collection.

Great. The pandemic has us in a tizzy, the execution of fighting the virus has become political, and the public was lied to about the Care-19 app. Life is so uncertain for most everybody right now, and they can't even trust that an app supposedly meant to be helpful isn't collecting and distributing personal information. No wonder people are reluctant to comply with contact tracing.

So, Google has a tool where you can look at all the COVID-19 information around the world. But, if we just look at North Dakota (if my math is correct), 2.9% of ND's population, that tested over the course of Corona, has been positive; and 1.1% of those cases have resulted in death (0.03% of ND's population). North Dakota makes up about .001% of the world's population and the state makes up for 0.000003% of the world's deaths. And 0.013% of the world's population has succumbed to Coronavirus. But Let's not forget, 94% of deaths worldwide were people "with underlying conditions."

The above stats don't necessarily have North Dakotans "shaking in their boots" about this virus. We are constantly bombarded with news (both real and fake) about the COVID-19. But we don't even have a mask mandate or many shutdowns in North Dakota, and we aren't dropping like flies. Neither is the rest of the world - whether they have strict mandates or not. So, I can understand why North Dakotans are not complying.

How do you feel about the contact tracing efforts?