It starts with a phone call from a public health worker: You’ve been in contact with someone who has COVID-19. If you’re feeling sick, you may be asked to self-isolate, get a coronavirus test, and share the contact information for everyone you’ve recently interacted with. The practice, known as contact
It starts with a phone call from a public health worker: You’ve been in contact with someone who has COVID-19. How do you feel?
It could cost billions of dollars to rapidly recruit, train and deploy a massive new public health workforce to identify every of COVID-19 case and trace the contacts of each individual, according to the recommendations in a new report coauthored by university health experts and an organization representing U.S. state and territorial health officials.
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.
But at current funding and staffing levels, according to the report, state and local health departments are far short of the resources required to perform the time-consuming tasks of identifying and monitoring the contacts of each confirmed case. 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.
“That’s one way you could put people back to work and have the added value of potentially shortening the epidemic,” Dr. Joia Mukherjee, the group’s chief medical officer, told ABC News. “This is really doable, the contact tracing piece. But it has to be heavily invested in.”
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