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in-law because h symptoms and tested with. They probably focused specifically on the forty-eight hours before you first started feeling sick (if you did feel sick). This is the process known as contact tracing. Although it felt new to many people around the world during COVID, contact tracing is actually an old strategy. It was essential to eradicating smallpox in the twentieth century and is also at the center of strategies to fight Ebola, tuberculosis, and HIV in the twenty-first. Contact tracing works best in countries that excel at testing and processing data--among them, South Korea and Vietnam. But both of those countries did things that wouldn't fly in the United States. Under a law passed after the 2014 outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS , the South Korean government used data from credit cards, mobile phones, and surveillance cameras to trace the movements of an infected person and identify people they had contact with. It published this information online, though it had to restrict some of the data after regional governments gave out too many details about people's movements. According to the journal Nature, one man "was wrongly accused of having an affair with his sister-in-law because their overlapping maps revealed they dined together at a restaurant."11 Vietnam also used posts on Facebook and Instagram, along with mobile phone location data, to supplement extensive face-to-face interviews. In March 2020, before the country was testing every passenger arriving from the U.K., a flight from London arrived in Hanoi with 217 passengers and crew.12 Three days later, a patient went to the hospital with symptoms and tested positive for COVID. Vietnamese authorities tracked down all 217 people from the flight and identified 16 more cases among them. Everyone on the plane and more than 1,300 of their contacts were quarantined. In all, there were 22 cases related to the flight, a small fraction of the cases that would've happened if all those passengers and crew members had simply gone on their way.