Reminds me of (now takeout only) restaurants which have their bathrooms closed "for covid," or public drinking fountains which are still closed "for covid." Not really much to due with covid at this point I suspect. So it may not really be about measuring infections at all, but that played piano makes noise and requires tuning, and so administration would rather just not, and now there is an excuse.
Many places have used Covid as an excuse to regress and implement desired polices. Take for example the Tate Modern, a museum in London. Under the argument of COVID you must have a ticket to enter (previously free). You can get a ticket by scanning a QR at the door, you simply have to give an name and email.
You can see how they got to that place, so they can control the density of visitors which is important because of COVID, but it's also something they've wanted for years.
contact tracing only works when a pandemic is in the hundreds, maybe a few thousand tops. After that it becomes too intractable to trace and also yields little benefit.
