In New Jersey, the new epicenter of the Wuhan virus, there’s no end in sight to our “shelter at home” lock down,  but I’m pleased to note that we have completed our quarantine.  No, the Governor hasn’t released us from durance vile, but quarantine is over.  “Quarantine” derives from the Italian word “quaranta,” which means forty.  It dates back to the good old days in Europe, when plague after plague depopulated the countryside.  Originally, confinement was 30 days and therefore was called a trentino.  But politicians  then were much like politicians now, so they extended the confinements to 40 days.  Why?  Then, as now, no one can tell you.  If I had to guess, I’d blame the church.  There are too many references to 40 in the Bible for this to be a coincidence.  Noah was on the Ark 40 days.  Moses was on Mt. Sinai 40 days.  Jesus was in the wilderness 40 days, and was on Earth 40 days after the resurrection.  The Jerusalem Temple was destroyed 40 years after the crucifixion.  Muslims got in the act too; Muhammad was 40 years old when he received the revelation from the archangel Gabriel, a/k/a Jibril.  In New Jersey, we were locked up on March 21.  So quarantine ended April 30.  They told us just to stay home to flatten the curve, and we did that.  Hospitals did not get overwhelmed.  NY is closing the hospital in the Javits Center and sending the hospital ship away.  Trump sent them so many ventilators they finally told him to stop.  So that’s it, right?  We can come out now and survey the wreckage.  Not so fast!  The “experts” have other ideas.  Robert Redfield of the US Centers for Disease Control says we can’t reopen without scaled-up contact tracing and increased testing.  Contact tracing entails interviewing everyone diagnosed with Wuhan and finding other people who came in contact with them.  A former chief of the CDC says this will require an “army” of 300,000 contact tracers.  Johns Hopkins says we’ll need at least 265,000 to match the tracing done in Wuhan, China.  That’s probably a low number, considering that all they did in Wuhan was seal people in their apartments and wait for them to die.  This is not just a proposal.  Massachusetts already has budgeted $44 million to hire 1,000 tracers.  Now, it happens that about 40 million people are out of work, so we could hire a few hundred thousand new government employees.  Trump has his Space Force, so why not the Fauci Trace Force?  Of course, it will take some time to get Congress to fund it, write the regulations,  find and train the tracers.  People are itching to break out now, so I don’t think they’ll be willing to wait that long.  Let’s face it.  If the Trace Force already existed, who among us is willing to sit docilely at home waiting for a federal (or State) bureaucrat to do his job, and then for his supervisor, and then his supervisor, to approve it, and then for the Trace Force to send out the results?  I won’t.  But let’s pretend the Trace Force actually exists.  How would it do its job?  The Mayo Clinic says, once someone has been identified as infected, the Trace Force tries to track down others who have had recent prolonged exposure to that person when they may have been infectious.  That means being within 6 feet of the person for more than 10 minutes, or in a health care setting, for five minutes.  Piece of cake, right?  “Okay, you tested positive (UNCLEAN!), so now give me a list of every person you have come within 6 feet of since you were infected, keeping in mind that there is no way to know when you became infected.”  Easy.  But fret not.  You’re not expected to keep a running list of everyone who comes within 6 feet of you for an undetermined period of time, although some Governors are likely to order just that.  Never fear.  Technology to the rescue.  You don’t need to keep a list.  Your cellphone will rat you out.  Cellphones have several means of logging our activity.  GPS tracks our location, and Bluetooth exchanges signals with nearby devices.  So, the helpful experts tell us, if someone tests positive for Wuhan, health officials could obtain a record of that person’s cellphone activity and compare it with the data emitted by other phone owners.  If all this sounds like an invasion of privacy, it’s only because it is.  “Tracing worked well in South Korea.”  That may be, but then again, there is no concept of personal privacy in Asia.  “They’re doing it in Germany.”  Seriously, you’re giving me Germany as example?  Here’s Ulf Buermeyer, of the Berlin Department of Justice, and president of Germany’s Society for Civil Rights. “I am a privacy advocate, but I don’t hold privacy as an absolute value.  Privacy has to be balanced in context with other human rights.  Life and health, I think, are important human rights.”  So much for German privacy.  Papers please!  The problem with such a system in America is that darned Constitution of ours.  As recently as 2 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that we have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of our physical movements.  That means, in order to gather the information from the phones, the government would need a court order.  This rule applies to investigations of murderers and terrorists.  I don’t think it would be waived because somebody sneezed.  Not surprisingly, the Left is prepared to cancel your constitutional rights, for your own good, of course.
Derek Thompson of Atlantic Magazine says, “tracing might seem like a violation of our dignity and privacy … but compared with our present nightmare, strategically sacrificing our privacy might be the best way to protect other freedoms.”  Once again, the Left assures us, the only way to protect our rights is to surrender them to the government.  Anyone who’s uncomfortable with the prospect of officials from the Ministry of Tracing examining your every move, raise your hand.  My hand’s up.  Google and Apple promise they won’t sell your movements to commercial interests.  I guess that means they’ll stop because they’re doing that now.  What if you have no smart phone?  Maybe the government will issue new Obamaphones, with the handy tracing app.  If you have a phone and don’t carry it, will that be a crime?  It will be in Michigan.  And when the Wuhan virus is gone for good, will the government stop snooping, and send the tracers back to work at the 7-11?  Don’t hold your breath.  Rights that are “sacrificed” never come back.