My experience of contact tracing.
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My daughter was sent home from school to isolate Tuesday morning, following a positive test by her teacher (who had been isolating since Friday).

She rapidly developed (moderate) fever and kept falling asleep (fine now), so was tested /1

This was 2.30pm Tuesday.

Result came through 10pm Thursday; within half an hour we had phoned all contacts (piano teacher, school, houseguests, other direct contacts).

Contact tracers phoned us 17 hours later (Friday afternoon); we gave them all the same information. /2

I asked what the point of contacting people we had already contacted; they confessed "basically... not much".

Since then they have repeatedly been contacting us (in isolation) by phone and text to confirm our details, even though I& #39;ve told them we& #39;re isolating. /3

But the potentially important point: if there& #39;s only a 5-day serial interval with this virus the clock is ticking, so the whole thing is actually a waste of precious time (here, 17 hours) versus requesting whoever gets the positive result to phone contacts themselves ASAP. /4

I& #39;m not convinced this is a great use of £12bn, which is currently around £14k per contact reached (our family counts as 4, so £60k). /5