It’s going to take lots of people, and lots of money and cooperation, for contact tracing to help the U.S. control the spread of COVID-19.
To suppress epidemics to manageable levels, countries around the world have turned again and again to contact tracing—the labor-intensive process of tracking down people who might have been exposed to a disease to ensure they don’t pass it to others.
Contact tracing is a way of “stalking routes of viral spread and severing them before they reach more people,” writes Andrew Joseph in a May 28 article published by STAT.
It stands to reason that tracing could be helpful during the coronavirus pandemic. But, according to Joseph, it’s going to take lots of people, and lots of money and cooperation, for contact tracing to work in the U.S.
Contact tracers are often the ones who tell people they have COVID-19. While providing information about the virus, these tracers also ask about where that person has been in recent days and with whom they’ve interacted. Tracers then reach out to those contacts and ask them to quarantine.
“Tracers keep in touch with both cases and contacts, monitoring their health, making sure they have a way to get food, and, in some cases, finding a place for them to stay away from their families,” writes Joseph. “They also have to work quickly; people become infectious just a few days after contracting the virus.”
Experts are hoping that contract tracing could help us keep COVID-19 cases under control until better drugs and vaccines arrive. But these efforts could run into several challenges:
- Many Americans may not be open to quarantining for up to 2 weeks if they’ve been exposed to the virus.
- People who have the virus might resist divulging where they’ve been and with whom they’ve had contact.
- The public may not be compliant, given that some individual responses to the pandemic, like wearing masks, have become political statements.
Finally, the job of tracing may simply be too big.
“Although the number of cases the country is reporting is down from its peak, there are still some 20,000 new COVID-19 infections each day,” writes Joseph. “That’s a lot of people to interview, and a lot of contacts to hunt down, and there are only so many tracers hired so far.”
Read the full article to find out how states are currently gearing up for contact tracing.