This doesn’t really bother the government, because they actually want as many people as possible to be locked up, which is why they’ve been doing all of these insane lockdown and social distancing things these last few months.
But it should bother people.
People identified as having been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for coronavirus will not be told who has named them when they are asked to self-isolate for two weeks.
The NHS Test and Trace programme launched yesterday and requires people who develop symptoms to self-isolate for seven days and to order a test.
If they test positive for the disease they must then hand over phone numbers and email addresses for people they have interacted with in recent days.
Those people will then be contacted and told that they must go into quarantine for 14 days – but they will not find out who originally tested positive.
The need for secrecy has been partially blamed on a fear of reprisals from people angry at being told to stay at home and potentially losing out financially if they are unable to work.
But there are concerns that not revealing who has named someone could leave the system open to abuse in the form of pranks or people maliciously reporting someone they have not come into contact with.
Those people who are contacted by NHS Test and Trace will only be told that they are a ‘significant contact’ of someone who has tested positive.
People who test positive will be told to share the contact details of anyone they have spent more than 15 minutes with at a distance of less than two metres in the absence of protective screening.
Call handlers have been given scripts on how best to deal with people who take the news that they need to self-isolate badly.
They have been told to ‘stay calm’ and try saying things like ‘I can hear that you are angry’ and ‘I am trying my best to help you’.
NHS Test and Trace has launched without a new contact tracing app which will digitally record who people have been in close contact with.
That means the current system is entirely reliant on human testimony, prompting fears it could be abused or manipulated.
Michael Veale, lecturer in digital rights and regulation at University College London, told The Telegraph: ‘It is a real possibility and you have to have trust that people will not do that.
‘The concern is that if that happens to some people then everyone might start to doubt whether or not their instruction to isolate was valid or not.’
The programme’s definition of a close contact and the fact social distancing rules remain in place means that most people are likely to know who may have reported them even if they are not told by officials.
Concerns had been expressed that the data revealed during the process could be passed onto the police to crackdown on non-compliance with lockdown rules.
For example, if someone has visited a friend’s house during lockdown but is then flagged as a contact for a positive test and they then have to reveal their rule breaking.
Yes. That is exactly what the government wants.
Coronavirus is about as dangerous as the flu. We’ve known this for some time now. There is no way for the government to argue that they don’t have this actual data confirming that coronavirus is not a threat for the vast majority of the population. The logical conclusion, after considering what they state as their goal and what they do in an alleged attempt to achieve it, is that they’re blatant liars.
The government is using coronavirus as an excuse to increase its power to levels only a handful of science fiction authors could have even imagined. Our rulers want total control over people, total knowledge about what people do, and total power to rule unchallenged.
And they’re achieving all of that by simply telling people that the flu is dangerous and that they have to comply in order to be safe.
Pictured: the coronavirus after landing on Earth, looking for people to infect.
But we don’t need the government to keep us safe. We have the right to decide what risks to take.
Unfortunately, people have forgotten that the government is supposed to serve them, not the other way around.