‘We need an army’: Hiring of coronavirus contact tracers seen as key to curbing disease spread
K.J. Seung is surprised to be hiring and training new workers in Boston.
His public health nonprofit, Partners in Health, specializes in helping the poorest people in developing nations — tracking down contacts of Ebola patients in Liberia and Sierra Leone; running child health and HIV clinics in Haiti; and operating tuberculosis control programs in Peru. But now it is advertising for 500 people to help do what’s known as contact tracing to try to control Covid-19 in Massachusetts.
It’s the first step in the next stage of fighting the pandemic. Boston-based Partners in Health has trained 12,000 community health workers in countries including Malawi, Mexico, and Rwanda and now it will help train a battalion of workers in Massachusetts to interview everyone diagnosed with Covid-19 and find other people who may have been infected by them. This old-fashioned, shoe-leather public health approach contained the SARS outbreak in 2003 and 2004, and public health experts agree it will be vital to eventual control of the new disease.
“We never thought we would be doing this kind of work here,” Seung, senior health and policy adviser for tuberculosis at Partners In Health, told STAT. “We never thought we would be in a once-in-100-year pandemic, either.”
Combined with more widespread testing, contact tracing is seen as an essential part of the strategy for keeping the coronavirus in check after the first wave recedes and the economy reopens. But the work is highly labor-intensive, and public health departments across the U.S. have been woefully underfunded for years. [Continue reading…]