N.Y.C. Hired 3,000 Workers for Contact Tracing. It's Off to a Slow Start.

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

New York City’s ambitious contact-tracing program, a crucial initiative in the effort to curb the coronavirus, has gotten off to a worrisome start just as the city’s reopening enters a new phase on Monday, with outdoor dining, in-store shopping and office work resuming.

The city has hired 3,000 disease detectives and case monitors, who are supposed to identify anyone who has come into contact with the hundreds of people who are still testing positive for the virus in the city every day. But the first statistics from the program, which began on June 1, indicate that tracers are often unable to locate infected people or gather information from them.

Only 35 percent of the 5,347 city residents who tested positive or were presumed positive for the coronavirus in the program’s first two weeks gave information about close contacts to tracers, the city said in releasing the first statistics. The number ticked up slightly, to 42 percent, during the third week, Avery Cohen, a spokeswoman to Mayor Bill de Blasio, said on Sunday.

Contact tracing is one of the few tools that public health officials have to fight Covid-19 in lieu of a vaccine, along with widespread testing and isolation of those exposed to the coronavirus. The early results of New York’s program raise fresh concerns about the difficulties in preventing a surge of new cases as states across the country reopen.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/nyregion/nyc-contact-tracing.html

[onecaliberal]

1. We can't do a fucking thing right.

This is why California kicked down to begin with when the bag area attempted to contact trace but it was nearly impossible.

[ancianita]

7. Contact tracing is time consuming, hard to develop a professional protocol that builds trust.

This isn't about doing something right. It's about balancing privacy with public health cooperation.

This is about getting the data right up front, especially in the hot zone zip codes.

People are hard to find; once found, hard to talk to; once talked with, hard to get them to tell who they contacted without the interviewee feeling they're betraying their contact's privacy. With multiple contacts for each interviewee, the tracing process is even harder.

[onecaliberal]

10. Other countries seem to be able to do it just fine.

Clearly it’s complicated. If an infected person walks through a store of strangers, how do you track those people down? We’re not hiring enough people, we’re not getting them trained quickly enough.. blah blah blah. We STILL don’t have adequate testing let alone tracing. The plan is every man for himself.

[DSandra]

11. Because America is not a fully civilized country

Much of America rejected government till the FDR era and then again since the Reagan revolution. We haven’t even been able to get together a healthcare system.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

2. I figured that would happen.

I considered applying for some contact tracing jobs a few weeks ago, but then I thought about the likely headaches from uncooperative people and decided against it.

Not to mention that several of them will get infected from doing STUPID stuff like going to crowded bars, and they won't want to discuss it.

[moosewhisperer]

3. PSA

We need a national public service announcement campaign to tell educate people about why contact tracing is important, not only to cooperate, but to make sure they can recall contacts and their info.

[SunSeeker]

4. Every country can do contact tracing but us. Pathetic. nt

[Igel]

5. Some have more trust between citizens.

Others had laws mandating it.

The whole "don't ask about protests" is also a bit of weirdness. Granted, it's an untraceable mess, but even then it might lead to "this particular person got it because the virus spontaneously generated."

[EllieBC]

6. Why wouldn't they be allowed to ask?

Do we want correct data or feel good bullshit?

[Steelrolled]

13. We are living in Super-Bizzaro world right now

I am looking forward to our return to Normal-Bizzaro world.

[ancianita]

8. Now that this news is out, we can bet that Cuomo will give the full factual progress report.

And when he gives his next briefing, and gets questions about the problems, he'll discuss how those are handled, too.

Public health data is an upfront, slow slog, but a necessary one since pandemics are in the world's future.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

9. Contact Tracing is a job, probably as satisfying as making cold sales calls.

Most people will just hang up on you, and that's the "nice" response.

I would probably just hang up. I get so many calls, I'd figure "contract tracing" is just one more scam call. No way I'd name my friends to "some caller".

[EllieBC]

12. Seeing as though most of us won't even answer calls from

numbers we don’t recognize or that come up “unknown”, I am not surprised people aren’t answering. This isn’t 1982. People can ignore calls from callers they don’t know.

[truthisfreedom]

14. As a country we do not take this disease seriously. We were bad in 1918.

And we're worse now. Suspicious and freaked out.