Contact tracing for COVID-19 is hybrid of old and new technologies

The truth about the coronavirus and contact tracing — finding out who is infected, who else might have been exposed by an infected person and then isolating those people — is that national and local public health departments have had to cobble together old and new technologies to track the spread of COVID-19.

And in some cases, departments have had to jury-rig solutions to minimize the many hours of manual labor it takes to do thorough contact tracing as the volume of cases has swamped the capacity of agencies to cope with the pandemic. 

Health departments have had to rely