Like health departments all over the state, the county has rushed to train other government workers to do contact tracing, scaling its workforce from six to 52.

Phil Murphy’s announcement this month that the state would train and hire 1,000 new contact tracers to help out local health departments.

Contact tracing is a long-standing public health tool where tracers interview positive people about their close contacts who may have been exposed, and then advise those contacts to quarantine, get tested or monitor for symptoms, depending on the virus.

In the absence of a statewide plan to enlist new contact tracers, the state’s patchwork of 94 municipal and county health departments have found their own help from volunteers and repurposed public workers, essentially tripling the number of workers doing disease investigation in New Jersey to about 900, according to the Department of Health.

The governor said the state will partner with Rutgers School of Public Health to train at least 1,000 members of a Community Contact Tracing Corps.

But in some of the hardest hit areas of the state — where health departments were so overwhelmed with cases that they had no choice but to tell positive patients to inform their close contacts themselves — an influx of contact tracers could be a game changer.

Nwako said having far more contact tracers earlier in the pandemic would have been better, but no one was prepared because the public health workforce has been decimated over the years?

“It’s an opportunity for the school to work with the state to train both students and a workforce around a practical skill set that then serves the public health of the population.".

Megan Baker, a Camden County environmental health specialist, is on the phone in her office doing contact tracing last week.Phil McAuliffe For The Times Of Trenton.

Halkitis said that while the School of Public Health is training and helping to deploy these tracers, it will be creating a kind of prototype for how to do it, so it can be scaled up and eventually managed by a third party, like a staffing company or nonprofit.

Murphy said his new plan will also increase consistency statewide by requiring local health departments to collaborate for a more regional, county-based approach and implement a new technological platform built specifically for managing coronavirus cases.

It will be re-evaluated as the state works with Rutgers School of Public Health to stand up the new workforce.

Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association for County and City Health Departments, said it is hard to compare states’ tracing plans because many are still being developed.

“Public health experts, including NACCHO, have advised that at least 30 contact tracers per 100,000 population will be needed in this next phase of the response,” Casalotti said.

California, like New Jersey, is relying on universities with public health know-how to train 10,000 new contact tracers.

He said he believes case numbers, more than the state population, should determine the number of contact tracers needed, and that 1,000 hires sounds like a great place for New Jersey to start.