US has 28,000 coronavirus contact tracers, CDC says. It needs 72,000 more
Kimberly Jocelyn got a job as a contact tracer in New York City right after she graduated college, a job that reaches out to between 30 and 50 people in a day, CNBC reported.
She and her team work to find chains of infection before they become outbreaks, according to CNBC.
“My first call was with someone who was confused about how they contracted the virus,” Jocelyn told CNBC. “We’re here to provide information about Covid, understand how they contracted Covid and also to understand how they are, to see if they need any resources.”
Contact tracing isn’t fool-proof, but public health experts say the method is proven to help contain the spread of infectious diseases, CNBC reported. But the Centers for Disease Control says the U.S. has far fewer contact tracers than it needs to track the spread of COVID-19, according to The Hill.
CDC Director Robert Redfield told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that the number of contact tracers in the U.S. increased from 6,000 to 28,000 between January and June, The Hill reported. However, Redfield says the goal is still to get to 100,000, according to The Hill.
“That’s going to be critical for what we’re doing,” Redfield said, according to The Hill.
Contact tracers find positive coronavirus cases, determine the patient’s contacts, and connect people with services to test and isolate, NPR reported. Many states already have a bank of trained volunteers or workers reserved, bringing the nation’s total to 68,525 contact tracers - still well below the 100,000 mark Redfield aims for, according to NPR.
Contact tracers are a crucial part of keeping communities safe as states move forward with reopening, NPR reported. Without them, people who have been exposed to the virus could easily continue to spread COVID-19 to those around them before they even know they came into contact with it, according to NPR.
“We’re reopening before we have the system ready to stop cases from becoming clusters and clusters from becoming outbreaks,” Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC, told NPR.
States have been affected differently, and some need more contact tracers than others, NPR reported. Seven states - Alaska, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, Oregon, Vermont and West Virginia - plus Washington, D.C., Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, have a sufficient number of contact tracers already, according to NPR.
Six other states - Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, North Dakota, South Carolina and Washington - have enough contact tracers when including their reserve staff, NPR reported. But the remaining 37 states are short, according to NPR.
While the federal government has allocated some funding, states and local municipalities are shouldering most of the burden in recruiting contact tracers, The Hill reported. Congress previously designated $25 billion for coronavirus efforts, including testing and contact tracing, according to The Hill.
But House Democrats have introduced a new coronavirus response package worth $75 billion for testing and contact tracing, The Hill reported. The White House has advised states not to reopen until they have sufficient numbers of contact tracers, according to CNBC.
“If you’re not doing mitigation, so closing things down, implementing social distancing, once you stop doing that, the only tool you have to keep people from transmitting to each other is contact tracing, isolation and quarantine,” Dr. Karen Smith, former director of the California Department of Public Health, told CNBC. “It’s the only tool you’ve got and it’s a tool that works really well when adequately staffed.”
This story was originally published June 23, 2020 at 7:06 PM with the headline "US has 28,000 coronavirus contact tracers, CDC says. It needs 72,000 more."