“It is broken because so many parts of our prevention system are broken.” “I think it’s easy to say contact tracing is broken,” said Carolyn Cannuscio, an expert on the method and an associate professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Pennsylvania. epidemic, states and cities have struggled to detect the prevalence of the virus because of spotty and sometimes rationed diagnostic testing and long delays in getting results. But few places have reported systemic success. The goal of contact tracing for Covid-19 is to reach people who have spent more than 15 minutes within six feet of an infected person and ask them to quarantine at home voluntarily for two weeks even if they test negative, monitoring themselves for symptoms during that time. One is the sheer number of people, the second is the delay in getting test results back, the third is the wide community spread of the disease.” “We are not doing it to the level or extent that it should be done,” said Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, echoing the view of many state and city leaders. In some regions, large swaths of the population have refused to participate or cannot even be located, further hampering health care workers. And in New York City’s tracing program, workers complained of crippling communication and training problems.Ĭontact tracing, a cornerstone of the public health arsenal to tamp down the coronavirus across the world, has largely failed in the United States the virus’s pervasiveness and major lags in testing have rendered the system almost pointless. Just as it is in North Carolina, where the state’s health secretary recently told state lawmakers that its tracking program was hiring outside workers to keep up with a steady rise in cases, as a number of other states have done.Ĭities in Florida, another state where Covid-19 cases are surging, have largely given up on tracking cases. In Austin, Texas, the story is much the same. In Arizona’s most populated region, the coronavirus is so ubiquitous that contact tracers have been unable to reach a fraction of those infected.
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