In Texas, where gyms and offices this week joined the list of businesses that can reopen at limited capacity, only half of the 4,000 contact tracers needed by the state have been hired so far.
In Illinois’ Cook County, there are about 30 contact tracers for the 2.5 million people who live outside of Chicago — far fewer than the 750 that officials are hoping for should funding become available in the next couple of weeks. Last week, the county racked up the most confirmed coronavirus infections in the nation.
And in Washington, which has managed to hire and train more than 1,300 contact tracers, state health officials last Friday had to issue a statement to dispel “rumors” circulating online about its tracing efforts.
As public health officials point to contact tracing as a key component for tracking the spread of the coronavirus and preventing a flare-up of cases amid the wave of reopenings, some agencies are wrestling with a lack of necessary resources from the federal government, a need for more qualified workers and a growing backlash of misinformation.
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Making matters worse are the absence of a cohesive national plan and coherent communication from the White House about the importance of contact tracing, said Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development who coordinated the United States’ humanitarian response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
“It’s a massive messaging failure from this administration,” he said.
Contact tracing is a time-consuming process that has been used for decades to combat the spread of illnesses, including Ebola and SARS. It involves calling people who are confirmed ill by their local health departments, asking them for their recent contacts and reaching out to those people to determine if they feel sick, need testing and must self-isolate. The goal is for public health agencies to pinpoint where outbreaks are occurring in a community and to stop further transmission of a disease like COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
Konyndyk added that the country is “not as ready as we could have been” if the government had started preparing the public for the idea of tracing and the effort involved while most people were still isolating at home. “But the federal government chose not to own the issue,” he said.Contact tracing is part of the White House’s reopening guidelines that were unveiled in mid-April, advising states to have the “ability to quickly set up safe and efficient screening and testing sites for symptomatic individuals and trace contacts of COVID+ results.”
Later that month, President Donald Trump said during a news briefing that “we’ve gotten good at tracing” — a claim that health experts disputed as failing to recognize the nation’s underfunded patchwork of contact tracing systems that are now being haphazardly rolled out during the pandemic.
Konyndyk said there are swaths of the country where partial and phased reopenings make sense because data has shown lower rates of new coronavirus cases, but lockdowns and stay-at-home orders shouldn’t be fully lifted without states and communities having the capabilities to adequately test and trace.
Without those, Konyndyk added, “it’s incredibly reckless.”
In recent weeks, lawmakers in Washington have been pressing for increased federal funding and a national plan to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assist public health agencies in hiring, training and deploying contact tracers.
One measure set forth by two Democrats, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Andy Levin of Michigan, proposes a “containment corps” in which the Department of Labor would fund state and local workforce agencies, which would in turn help unemployed individuals find jobs as contact tracers and other related roles.
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The House on Friday narrowly passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief package crafted by Democrats, and includes $75 billion for developing and implementing a national system for testing and contact tracing. Trump, however, has already threatened to veto the bill in its current form if it passes the Senate.
Some workforce advocates say the bill, coupled with the roughly $2 trillion relief package passed in March, is essential, though it fails to take into consideration the scale and the scope of the crisis. Public health experts have estimated the U.S. will need between 100,000 to 300,000 people with the skills for contact tracing.
“This isn’t just for three to six months either, but the next several years,” said Andy Van Kleunen, CEO of the National Skills Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group for improved skills training.
Van Kleunen said state and local health agencies’ current use of volunteers, other government employees and some 40,000 National Guard members who’ve helped with COVID-19 testing and tracing have been important in these earlier months of containing the virus. But agencies can’t rely on them to be part of a long-term workforce for a pandemic that has no end date in sight.
