Contact Tracing Crucial Part Of Reopening, But Lack Of National Plan Likely To Cause Uneven Success
There's little funding on the horizon for states to ramp up their contact tracing efforts even as medical experts and others lobby the White House to back such work. Meanwhile, a study shows how successful tracing can be in curbing the pandemic.
Reopening Means Contact Tracing. Many States Aren't Ready.
Nationwide, contact tracing — which Clements and more than 2,000 other public health workers across the country perform on a regular basis — is the key to reopening businesses and resuming some form of normal life as the coronavirus pandemic begins to subside, epidemiologists say. But with no national plan and scant federal dollars on the horizon, states are funding their own initiatives for what experts predict will be a massive undertaking lasting 18 months to two years, until a vaccine is developed. (Vestal and Ollove, 4.29)
Bipartisan Group Pitches The White House On A $46.5 Billion Covid-19 Plan
In the past month, President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner has fielded calls from at least three members of a new coalition pitching an aggressive plan to reopen America. The political backgrounds of Kushner’s callers diverged sharply: They ranged from Scott Gottlieb, a Trump appointee who ran the Food and Drug Administration until last year, to a pair of Obama-era health officials whose views diverge from the White House’s at nearly every turn. Their message, however, was largely the same: The White House should back a $46.5 billion effort to hire an army of 180,000 contact-tracers, book blocks of vacant hotel rooms so Americans sick with Covid-19 can self-isolate, and pay sick individuals to stay away from work until they recover. (Facher, 4/29)
Study: Contact Tracing Slowed COVID-19 Spread In China
Isolation and contact tracing—which are now key topics as US officials discuss plans to open up the country—helped control the spread of COVID-19 in Shenzhen, China, according to a study published yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. In the first known coronavirus research of its kind, researchers studied 391 COVID-19 patients and their 1,286 close contacts—identified through symptomatic surveillance and contact tracing from Jan 14 to Feb 12—to characterize disease course, transmission, and the effect of control measures. (Van Beusekom, 4/28)
San Francisco Enlists A Key Latino Neighborhood In Coronavirus Testing
As public health experts plead for cities and states to dramatically increase the scale and speed of testing and contact tracing for the coronavirus, researchers in San Francisco, backed by dozens of volunteers, have launched an ambitious effort to test everyone older than 4 years old in a big part of one hard-hit neighborhood. They're calling the effort "Unidos en Salud – United in Health." (Westervelt, 4/28)
And in California —
San Francisco Chronicle:
Thousands Of Bay Area Residents Will Be Tested For The Coronavirus In UCSF
UCSF and Stanford University will launch two studies in May that are among the nation’s first large-scale, long-term coronavirus research projects. They will follow participants over several months, retest them regularly and report real-time data to health officials — potentially shaping California’s phased reopening of the economy. The studies, to be announced Wednesday, will together test 7,500 Bay Area residents who previously tested negative for the coronavirus. One study will follow 4,000 members of the general population, and the other 3,500 health care workers. (Ho, 4/29)