We Asked All 50 States About Their Contact Tracing Capacity. Here's What We Learned
States are eager to open up and get people back to work, but how do they do that without risking new coronavirus flare-ups? Public health leaders widely agree that communities need to ramp up capacity to test, trace and isolate. The idea behind this public health mantra is simple: Keep the virus in check by having teams of public health workers — epidemiologists, nurses, trained citizens — identify new positive cases, track down their contacts and help both the sick person and those who were exposed isolate themselves.
This is the strategy that has been proven to work in other countries, including China, South Korea and Germany. For it to work in the U.S., states and local communities will need ample testing and they'll need to expand their public health workforce. By a lot.
An influential group of former government officials released a letter Monday calling for a contact tracing workforce of 180,000. Other estimates of how many contact tracers are needed range from 100,000 to 300,000.States are eager to open up and get people back to work, but how do they do that without risking new coronavirus flare-ups? Public health leaders widely agree that communities need to ramp up capacity to test, trace and isolate. The idea behind this public health mantra is simple: Keep the virus in check by having teams of public health workers — epidemiologists, nurses, trained citizens — identify new positive cases, track down their contacts and help both the sick person and those who were exposed isolate themselves.
This is the strategy that has been proven to work in other countries, including China, South Korea and Germany. For it to work in the U.S., states and local communities will need ample testing and they'll need to expand their public health workforce. By a lot.
An influential group of former government officials released a letter Monday calling for a contact tracing workforce of 180,000. Other estimates of how many contact tracers are needed range from 100,000 to 300,000. [more]
Link to the related article from last week:
CDC Director Shares Plan On Contact Tracing
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield outlined the agency's "contact tracing" strategy in an interview with NPR, as states scramble to prepare for reopening. [snip]
[interview...]
CHANG: All right. Well, going back to you really briefly, Rob, how do the CDC's efforts so far match up with what other public health experts would like to see?
STEIN: Well, what I'm hearing is that it's a start, but they are really saying that it really falls far short. The CDC is only talking about directly deploying hundreds of workers, and the country probably needs tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these contact tracers. And, you know, it's a huge gamble to think we have all summer to get this together. New waves of outbreaks could easily erupt at any time and quickly overwhelm health departments. And the big missing piece of this...
CHANG: All right.
STEIN: ...Is testing. We don't have enough testing.
CHANG: That is NPR health correspondent Rob Stein and health policy reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin.
*sigh*
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