365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

Contact tracing is a race. But few U.S. states say how fast they’re running. - The Washington Post

Contact tracing is a race. But few U.S. states say how fast they’re running. - The Washington Post

Contact tracing is a race. But few U.S. states say how fast they’re running. - The Washington Post
Jul 04, 2020 3 mins, 34 secs

Public health workers have a small window of time to track down everyone Person A had close contact with over the past few days.

Recent case spikes in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia and California will frustrate contact tracing efforts there.

But even states seeing declines are finding it hard to measure their success in contact tracing, in part because the effort is often spearheaded by local and county health departments.

In Georgia and Colorado, health department officials say they are developing platforms for tracing data but can’t yet pull out numbers.

“Contact tracing is how you prevent cases from becoming clusters, clusters from becoming outbreaks,” said former CDC director Tom Frieden, who now works with the global health initiative Resolve to Save Lives.

Contact tracing is not new to public health agencies, which have long used it to curb diseases including tuberculosis, meningitis and measles.

Each positive test result calls for a case investigation, usually a phone call from a health worker that can last an hour or more.

“We’ve had people that have more than 60 known contacts, because they were very busy, they were very socially active,” said Stephen Haering, director of the Alexandria, Va., health department, which in May was averaging several dozen new positive cases a day.

“If we get it in the afternoon, we’re making [the call] that day,” said Haering, who is prepared to add more tracers if case numbers spike.

Many places didn’t attempt full contact tracing or abandoned efforts during the heights of their epidemics, when testing was more limited and health departments were short of tracers.

“Now that we’re able to focus on every positive case and get these comprehensive lists of contacts, we’re able to start making connections between places of exposure and types of exposure that individuals have,” said LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C.

Often, case investigators, who make initial calls to people in new positive cases, start out behind because test results typically take days.

“We found that, even with quite rapid detection of cases, even with quite extensive tracing, it’s likely that you’d need some additional measures alongside that,” Kucharski said, including social distancing and restrictions on gatherings.

Health officials in North Dakota, which is seeing only a few dozen positive cases per day, say they reach out to people within an hour of when they are notified by their health care provider of the test result.

Contact tracers in New Mexico, which has been adding between 100 and 200 cases per day, are reaching those people and their contacts a median of 48 hours after test results, short of the state’s target of 36 hours, officials said at a news conference in late June.

Officials in Massachusetts, which has experienced between 100 and 300 new cases per day recently, say they contact cases and contacts within 24 to 48 hours.

Colorado, with similar numbers testing positive, set a goal of reaching the close contacts of patients within 72 hours of test results, officials say, but won’t have the capability to draw metrics from the data until later this month.

One sign of success for a contact-tracing program comes when a new positive case involves someone tracers have already spoken with, and persuaded to quarantine, after identifying them as another infected person’s close contact.

He said he heard one public health leader comment recently, “If we reported those, it would be zero every day.”.

Conversely, new cases that cannot even in hindsight be traced to a known source — known as “unlinked” cases — demonstrate where contact tracing operations need to improve.

But a health department spokesman told The Washington Post that 25 percent of the state’s recent cases have been unlinked.

New York City began an ambitious contact-tracing program last month, but fewer than half of those who tested positive gave information about their close contacts, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) told the New York Times.

In Fairfax County, Va., the health department seeks contacts only from high-risk cases.

“We are currently in the process of hiring additional contact tracers, so they will be able to do the full contact tracing for every case that’s identified.”.

Schwartz said case investigators have managed to reach 91 percent of probable and lab-confirmed positive cases.

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED