‘Aren’t able to keep up’: Overwhelmed officials can’t track COVID-19 spread in Columbus
Health officials who oversee 16 counties in the Columbus area are unable to provide specific information about the origin, patterns and spread of the novel coronavirus within all but one of the counties it covers, citing the large number of cases and a lack of staff.
It’s a problem at local and state health departments across the country, and one that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working to address in an effort to end the country’s extended periods of confinement and social distancing by stopping COVID-19’s spread.
Coronavirus in the West Georgia area
The West Central Health District covers 16 counties around Columbus: Chattahoochee, Clay, Crisp, Dooly, Harris, Macon, Marion, Muscogee, Quitman, Randolph, Schley, Stewart, Sumter, Talbot, Taylor and Webster counties. As of April 14, there are 843 COVID-19 cases in the district.
Aside from Sumter County, the local county with the most confirmed COVID-19 cases, the West Central Health District was unable to provide information about the connections between coronavirus cases in the area.
The region is home to the county with most coronavirus cases per capita in Georgia to date. Randolph County, population of nearly 6,800, has the highest per capita infection rate in the state. Nearly 19 of every 1,000 people living in the county has COVID-19. The county has 122 confirmed cases. Its first case was confirmed on March 20, according to data analyzed by McClatchy.
Joe-Anne Burgin Nursing Home in Cuthbert, Randolph’s largest city, has 47 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 4 deaths as of April 8, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Sumter County, home to the cities of Americus and President Jimmy Carter’s residence of Plains, accounts for the district’s largest coronavirus totals. As of April 14, the county has 265 COVID-19 cases and 11 deaths. It has a population of just over 30,000. A little over two weeks ago, there were only 10 cases confirmed in Sumter.
Phoebe Putney Health System, which has two medical facilities in Dougherty County, one in Sumter County and one in Worth County, reports 27 people are hospitalized with COVID-19 and eight people have died at the Sumter facility as of April 10. Throughout the healthcare system, 1,671 people have tested positive for the coronavirus.
West Central Health District spokesperson Pamela Kirkland said Sumter’s proximity to Dougherty might account for the county’s high totals.
“Many individuals seem to have an association with Albany,” she said. “Employer, family, church (and so on.).”
But Kirkland could not provide that information for Muscogee or any of the other surrounding counties in the district. Contact tracing, the act of finding each sick person and then figuring out who they recently interacted with, has proven too difficult, Kirkland said.
When a patient tests positive for COVID-19, the health district notifies the patients and collects information about the patient’s close contacts, their employer, how long they’ve had symptoms and other places they’ve traveled. Officials at the Columbus health district had some success early on.
But as cases piled up, the district’s two epidemiologists and other volunteers were just trying to keep up with the influx of cases. The district has instead focused on reinforcing guidance from federal and state health officials about social distancing and staying home, Kirkland said.
“It got overwhelming, so they aren’t able to (contact trace) at this point,” she said. “They are calling all the positive cases and advising them on what to do. However, a lot of people don’t remember where they were or what they did the last five days.”
Cases in the Columbus area have not been pinpointed to specific events or gatherings yet, Kirkland said. The earliest cases in Albany can be traced back to two funerals, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
To contain the spread of cases, state and federal officials have said more people must be tested for COVID-19. Testing capacity remains an issue for Georgia. Gov. Brian Kemp and state health commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey said Monday that testing criteria at state-run test sites would be less restrictive in an effort to get more people tested.
State-run testing sites in the area continue to lag behind private labs and hospitals in their ability to collect samples and conduct tests, even as capacity increases.
The West Central Health District has collected test samples from 328 people at their Columbus site from mid-March to early April. Those numbers don’t include the samples collected in the district’s other counties, but those sites are getting less testing supplies than Columbus, Kirkland said.
For comparison, MercyMed, a Columbus healthcare center, tested 1,243 people over a four-day span. Of those, 186 people (15%) tested positive.
The testing requirements were less strict than the state’s, and the MercyMed testing was open to Alabama residents as well, said Billy Holbrook, MercyMed’s director of development.
How the federal government and tech giants could help with tracing
Local and state health departments might soon get some help contact tracing from the CDC.
CDC director Robert Redfield told National Public Radio last week the United States is working to ramp up testing and contact tracing measures to contain the spread.
Redfield said local and state health departments likely wouldn’t have the staff to do the time consuming and difficult tracking work. So, the federal government could provide assistance through its staff. It’s unclear how the CDC plans to accomplish this, but Redford told NPR an announcement was coming soon.
“It is going to be critical,” he said of contact tracing. “We can’t afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission — so it is going to be very aggressive, what I call ‘block and tackle,’ ‘block and tackle.’“
Redfield told NPR that the country has underinvested in public health for decades.
“So this is a time for us to reinvest heavily — get overprepared,” he added.
Apple and Google on Monday announced a Bluetooth-based COVID-19 contact tracing platform that could alert people if they’ve been exposed to COVID-19, technology news website the Verge reports.
Kirkland said having the CDC personnel would help.
“We’ve got some people who are volunteering with us right now, but they can’t volunteer 40 hours a week,” she said. “We don’t have the staff to cover every base. We have to go with what is the most important thing right now.”
As of April 14, Georgia has 14,223 confirmed coronavirus cases and 501 deaths.