Selena Simmons-Duffin reported today on National Public Radio that while states are eager to open up and get people back to work, how do they do that without risking new coronavirus flare ups? Public health leaders widely agree that communities need to ramp up capacity to test, trace and isolate. The idea behind this public health mantra is simple: Keep the virus in check by having teams of public health workers — epidemiologists, nurses, trained citizens — identify new positive cases, track down their contacts and help both the sick person and those who were exposed isolate themselves.
This is the strategy that’s been proven to work in other countries, including China, South Korea, and Germany. For it to work in the U.S., states and local communities will need ample testing and they’ll need to expand their public health workforce. By a lot.
An influential group of former government officials released a letter Monday calling for a contact tracing workforce of 180,000. Other estimates of how many contact tracers are needed range from 100,000 to 300,000.
NPR surveyed all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to ask them how many contact tracers they currently have and — and how many they were planning to add, if any. We got data for 41 states and the District of Columbia and found they have approximately 7,324 workers who do contact tracing on staff now, with plans to surge to a total of 35,582.
“It’s a start,” Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says of these totals. “There are some states that are really thinking about this and scaling it up, there are others that are just beginning to think about it.”