As California coronavirus cases spike, contact tracing stalled by fear and embarrassment - NBC News

The people on the other end of the line have all been identified as close contacts of an individual who tested positive for COVID-19, and she is one of 180 contact tracers in San Francisco calling to tell them to get tested and stay home.

But even just getting people on the phone can be a challenge, thanks to a confluence of factors hampering California’s contact tracing efforts — all of which ultimately make it more difficult to control the spread of COVID-19 in a state that now has the highest number of cases in the country.

Meanwhile, the rise in cases in the state have challenged contact tracers to keep up with the sheer volume of people to call.

Los Angeles County alone has 183,383 confirmed cases, health officials said Wednesday.

“There is no place in the world that has successfully limited transmission without a contact tracing program,” said Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and lead instructor for an online course on contact tracing.

Daniel Parker, an assistant professor of public health at the University of California Irvine, who is training tracers in Orange County, said they really need to get in touch with someone’s contact within three days of a positive test result to intercept transmission of the disease.

In Los Angeles County, which aims to reach 4,000 people a day in its contact tracing program, officials recently started offering $20 gift cards to people who participate.

“This is because people — and people have told us — that they’re fearful of losing their housing, their jobs and their relationships,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a press briefing last week.

True Beck, a public health worker managing a contact tracing team in Los Angeles, said in a few cases people have claimed on the phone that they haven’t been in contact with anyone, even though county employees can hear people in the background.

Michael Osur, Riverside County’s assistant director for public health, said his team has encountered people who feared speaking with a contact tracer could get them fired

Officials in Stanislaus County, in California’s Central Valley, said in a new conference last week that they realized their public health phone number does not have a caller ID, something they’re trying to fix