As far as I understand the process, when you test positive, they ask you if you’ve come into close contact with anyone in the past two weeks. If you provide them contact information for one or more other people, they contact those individuals and tell them (without saying who it is) that they’ve been in contact with a person who has tested positive for disease X and they should get tested and/or self-quarantine while watching for symptoms.
I’ve never head of it being compulsory. The CDC Field Epidemiology Manual (https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-manual/index.html) documents the process. Contact tracing has been used with HIV, tuberculosis, Ebola, and other outbreaks in the US for decades. I understand some will tell you Bill Gates is personally coming in to your bedroom at night to yank your brain out and replace it with Satan’s underpants, but contact tracing isn’t anything new or different with COVID-19. It’s from manuals decades old, updated regularly as methods and technology change and it’s all right out in the open.
Thanks.
“when you test positive, they ask you if you’ve come into close contact with anyone in the past two weeks.”
I have a mandatory test in a couple weeks required for surgery. I can’t even recall whom I’ve come in contact with, and I’m not going to try real hard to some up with names.