The latest approach to pinpointing coronavirus cases is going to take a bit of detective work. The CDC thinks contact tracing will be the key to containing COVID-19.
It’s an approach to combating the coronavirus that turns public health officials into sleuths. Chad Neilsen, the director of infection prevention at UF Health says contact tracing is a relatively simple process starting with:
"Reaching out to anyone who you literally had contact with, whether that’s a restaurant or other people to find out who also may have been exposed to COVID-19.”
According to the CDC, contact tracing can be broken down into three simple steps:
To start, a public health worker will speak with a patient who has confirmed COVID-19 or a suspected case, making a list of everyone the patient may have had close contact with.
Next, the healthcare worker will then contact those people, notifying them they may have been exposed to the virus. The patient’s identity will remain anonymous.
Finally, those contacts are advised to monitor symptoms and isolate until 14 days after their last possible exposure.
Neilsen says this type of monitoring is crucial to slowing the spread of the virus.
“You’ve identified someone who has the risk, you’ve told them, hey, you might be at risk for COVID[-19], and that stops that chain from them going out with it unknowingly,” said Neilsen.
The key is to help identify those who might be asymptomatic.
Though the monitoring relies primarily on communication between patients and healthcare workers, tech companies want to use apps to help contact trace using data to identify a person’s location and possible exposure.
Contact tracing was successfully used during the most recent ebola outbreak. But because the coronavirus outbreak is much larger, Neilsen says it’s going to be more difficult and take more time to contact trace and stop the spread of the virus.