Contact tracers (from left) Christella Uwera, Dishell Freeman and Alejandra Camarillo work at Harris County Public Health Contact Tracing facility in Houston in June.

Contact tracers (from left) Christella Uwera, Dishell Freeman and Alejandra Camarillo work at Harris County Public Health Contact Tracing facility in Houston in June.

The United States needs as many as 100,000 contact tracers to fight the pandemic, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Congress in June.

But in August, with coronavirus cases increasing in more than half of states, America has neither the staff nor the resources to be able to trace the contacts of every new case — a key step in the COVID-19 public health response.

NPR's latest survey of all 50 states, done in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, finds the national workforce has barely grown since mid June.

NPR's previous survey found a total contact tracing workforce of 37,110.

Eleven states said that their contact tracing workforce includes unpaid volunteers.

The analysis, based on state case counts over the past 14 days, was done using the Contact Tracing Workforce Estimator developed by The Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at the George Washington University.

Nine states reported that they have had to adjust contact tracing operations because of a surge in cases or testing delays.

"I think public health officials are exhausted and very discouraged and they feel like some officials are pointing to contact tracing as a failure of public health," she says.

But the majority of states NPR surveyed are not publicly sharing the contact tracing data they are gathering.

"There was a big push on testing data, there was a big push on demographic data," Allen says, noting that the quality and transparency of public data in those two areas has improved a lot.

Now, she says, contact tracing data needs a similar "serious push to get to a place where there's a standard set of indicators being reported, and everybody understands it's as important to report that information publicly, in the same way that you report testing information publicly.".

According to the survey, most states are gathering data about how quickly and completely contact tracers are able to successfully reach new cases and their contacts.

This data can offer clues about when more tracers, or public awareness campaigns, are needed.

Just under half of states also reported collecting data about how many quarantined contacts end up testing positive for coronavirus, along with how many new cases are linked to known positives.

That information — along with data gathered from conversations with contact tracers about where people think they may have been exposed to the virus — can give valuable insight into what is driving transmission.