"A survey of attitudes to contact-tracing across 19 countries in August found that nearly three-quarters of respondents would be willing to provide contact information. But rates varied. In Vietnam, only 4% of participants said that they wouldn’t provide this information. In the United States and Germany, the proportion was 21%, and in France, it was 25%. Concerns around data privacy and tracking are partly to blame, says researcher Sarah Jones at Imperial College London, who co-led the survey. “Many health authorities and governments, especially in North America and Western Europe, may need to urgently improve public-health messaging to mitigate concerns about contact-tracing,” she says. “Public trust in all sorts of institutions is declining,” says sociologist Robert Groves, former director of the US Census Bureau, who notes that this is especially the case in large urban areas where social cohesion has also declined. But the low numbers of people providing details of contacts or responding to calls from contact-tracers, while disappointing, are not surprising, says Mary Bassett, a public-health researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19 have a long-standing distrust of public-health authorities, she says. “For the African American community, there’s a history of malfeasance on the part of the public-health system,” she says, “and for the Latino community, there’s a problem of members of the community who are undocumented” — and fear deportation.” Systems are often hampered by a lack of support for people who fall ill or need to quarantine, too. Providing adequate financial compensation for personal hardship as a result of quarantine could shift people’s reluctance to comply. The prospect of being without income for two weeks — or losing a job entirely — is a big burden, says Plescia, and might explain people’s reluctance to provide details for their close contacts."