Because COVID-19 spreads quickly and can be transmitted before symptoms appear, contacts must be quickly identified and isolated to prevent potentially exponential spread.
Early cases of COVID-19 are believed to be linked to a live-animal market in Wuhan, China.
Now, public health officials across several states believe it could be used on a far greater scale to help track the spread of COVID-19, stamp out future flare-ups, and restart the economy. The Trump administration's top health officials have voiced support for tracing and tracking symptomatic individuals. Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, told NPR the plan to begin reopening the country will have to rely on"very aggressive" contact tracing.
"This is an intensive proposition to contact these people and we have a lot of transmissions in the country right now," Watson said. People wearing protective masks sit on a bench in Central Park during the coronavirus pandemic on April 11, 2020 in New York.Contact tracing is routinely utilized by public health departments around the country to control outbreaks of infectious diseases. But because COVID-19 spreads quickly and can be transmitted before symptoms appear, contacts must be quickly identified and isolated in order to prevent potentially exponential spread.
Recruits for the new positions could come from the ranks of the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, the authors propose, or health departments could tap recently retired government employees, medical students or others with relevant public health experience.
Working with Boston-based global health organization Partners in Health, Massachusetts, for example, is planning to hire and train roughly 1,000 contact tracers to work with local health officials to identify and limit potential new outbreaks. The initiative’s first 200 investigators include many people who have lost jobs as a result of the economic downturn.
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