Via The Washington Post: The Health 202: U.S. isn't ready for the contact tracing it needs to stem the coronavirus. Excerpt:
The United States is finally doing a better job of identifying Americans who are infected with the novel coronavirus.
But its capacity to contact and warn the web of people they potentially exposed to the virus is sorely lacking.
Contact tracing — in which those who had contact with infected people are notified and asked to self-isolate — is a key tool in keeping the highly infectious virus at bay as states reopen and Americans start visiting restaurants, shopping at retailers and going to their offices again.
Yet states and localities largely haven’t assembled the teams necessary to carry this out on a scale that public health experts say is necessary. Many are short on funds to scale up their contact tracing capacities, and those that have invested heavily are still finding it hard to reach the people they need to warn.
“Right now, we haven't been able to trace [spread of the virus] back to the source because we don't have all that track and trace work in place,” Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation. “And so that's a challenge for public health officials.”
Contact tracing is especially crucial as infections keep rising in many states.
Infections are increasing in at least 21 states across the South and West, as states allow businesses and individuals to gradually resume some semblance of normal life after shutdowns. While some governors have delayed reopening measures in response, it’s unclear whether there is wide political will to do so — and President Trump has said there won’t be a return to shutdowns even in the case of a second wave.
“Alabama, Oregon and South Carolina are among the states with the biggest increases,” my colleagues reported over the weekend. “Alabama saw a 92 percent increase in its seven-day average, while Oregon’s seven-day average was up 83.8 percent and South Carolina’s was up 60.3 percent.”
And in New York, which is reopening after the highest death toll from the virus in the country, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) threatened Sunday to shut down Manhattan and the Hamptons if local governments don't observe social distancing guidelines. “We’re not going to go back to that dark place because local governments didn’t do their job," he said, according to the New York Post.
Contact tracing failed to stem the first wave of coronavirus infections, which spiked in the United States back in March. Congress has since provided $631 million to state and local health departments for surveillance, including contact tracing, in coronavirus relief legislation.
But that’s far short of the $3.6 billion needed for the effort, according to an estimate by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. With infections now spread across the country, contact tracing is an even more extensive undertaking requiring 100,000 or more trained tracers to get in touch with strangers and persuade even some without symptoms to stay at home, The Post’s Frances Stead Sellers and Ben Guarino report.
“Health departments in many of the worst-affected communities are way behind in hiring and training those people,” they add. “The effort may also be hobbled by the long-standing distrust among minorities of public health officials, as well as worries about promising new technologies that pit privacy against the public good.”
