Johns Hopkins experts call on everyone to take part in coronavirus contact tracing
Stopping the coronavirus can only be done if everyone pitches in to help with contact tracing of the potentially deadly disease, health experts from Johns Hopkins University said Thursday.
“The disease uses our social contacts and what we do as a vehicle, so we have to change what we do if we want to stop it,” said Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Responding to a Herald question in a Thursday telebriefing, Gurley said “we all need to be ready to participate” in contact tracing to improve public health and protect others, pointing to the need for a nationwide effort that should impact all Americans.
“Any of us could be exposed to someone who had COVID-19, many of us already have,” said Gurley, “Our ability to stop this disease and stop transmission requires all of us to cooperate together.”
Massachusetts led the nation in contact tracing efforts when it launched a new program in early April using nearly 1,000 virtual contact tracers that were deployed throughout the state to connect with COVID-19 patients and their contacts.
Around 5,000 people, both coronavirus patients and people they’ve interacted with, have been contacted through the program that Gov. Charlie Baker said will be “a key element toward … stopping the spread.”
Baker said original projections indicated that a person with COVID-19 would typically have 10 close contacts who needed to be reached out to, but the average number so far “is actually only two.”
Dr. Crystal Watson of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said, “We’ve made a big commitment as a country already to slow the spread of this virus and we need to continue to work hard to address this.”
Across the country, Watson said, tens of thousands more contact tracers are needed to manage the pandemic, “We just don’t have enough capacity in our system right now.”
Contact tracing works in steps, as explained by Gurley, starting with identifying an infected patient, getting in touch with them and monitoring their health while they stay isolated.
Then contact tracers will talk to the patient about family, friends or coworkers they may have been in touch with, and find those people to ask about symptoms and advise them to limit contact with others.
Along with a strong labor force, good technology is also needed to ramp up these efforts.
Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are racing to harness Bluetooth technology to boost contact tracing of the coronavirus.
Both Apple and Google have signed onto the project, which asks cellphone users to voluntarily download system upgrades to their Apple and Android phones to allow proximity tracing.
The technology would alert users if they came too close to someone who had recently tested positive for the coronavirus.
Gurley said virtual tracers can’t do the work alone though, and community members with good people skills who are currently out of work and want to help out could be perfect for the job, for which training only takes a couple days.
Herald wire services contributed to this report.
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