Johns Hopkins University and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials published a well-documented white paper “A National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the US,” in April; we expect you may have seen it, and we hope you have instituted many of the steps outlined in it.
If you haven’t yet, we encourage you to do so.
At Bio-Defense Network, we call Contact Tracing one of the “Legs of the Ladder of Recovery.” The first leg is testing, which we all know is crucial. But without the second leg, comprehensive and exhaustive Contact Tracing, our efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 will be even more challenging.
As the authors note, “For COVID-19, we need an unprecedented and rapid scale-up of the public health workforce dedicated to case identification and contact tracing.”
Many state and local public health departments have been relying on volunteers, including members of Medical Reserve Corps and others to fill the roles of Contact Tracing, but we all know reliance on volunteers has its own limits. There is a nationwide public health workforce gap, and this pandemic has dramatically exacerbated that gap.
And that is why Bio-Defense Network has begun to assemble a cadre of public health, nursing and allied health students and recent graduates to conduct the work at an hourly rate. We believe working with universities around the nation will give us access to a qualified and eager workforce of knowledgeable Contact Tracers.
If we need help to help to fill your ranks of Contact Tracers, let us know, and we will quickly gear up provide them to you.