- Coronavirus contact tracking is not going as well as it should, at a time when the number of cases is increasing alarmingly in many parts of the country.
- That’s according to White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who offered at least one reason Friday for the current deficiencies related to coronavirus contact tracing.
- Too many people, Fauci said, don’t answer the phone when contact trackers call.
“Not going well. I have to tell you that it is not going well.
That’s the forceful assessment that White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also serves as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made on Friday regarding success (or lack thereof) today. regarding contact with the coronavirus. tracking. “If you get a positive result, then you go back and try to find out who that positive is,” Fauci said, the day after the coronavirus pandemic set new records in the United States on Thursday. “We really need to start doing that, because the idea of doing individual identification, isolation, contact tracing, particularly in some communities where people don’t want to cooperate, they don’t want to tell you where they have been and who has been with them.”
Did you get it? At a time when the number of reported coronavirus infections in the US has skyrocketed to almost 2.5 million, according to the latest numbers from Johns Hopkins University (and they’re probably even higher than that, depending on who you’re talking to. ) The ability to go back and try to figure out where these people might have been infected is failing for the most mundane reason you can think of:
People don’t answer the phone when coronavirus contact trackers call.
This is in part why Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who spent his post-Microsoft years using his base to combat health crises worldwide, lamented in recent days that the United States “is not even close “of doing enough to be done to fight the coronavirus. Along those same lines, there are also a variety of opinions on how much is enough when it comes to tracking coronavirus contacts.
Earlier this week, for example, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said as many as 28,000 people are doing contact search work across the country right now. However, he believes that number may need to expand to around 100,000 contact trackers, while former CDC chief Dr. Tom Frieden believes the United States needs even more than that (up to 300,000).
Despite the fact that the CDC has reserved more than $ 10 billion for states to use to increase their testing efforts, Fauci said he does not yet believe that local officials are making enough progress in this regard. And it’s something that will be an especially costly failure this fall, when cases will increase even further.
“When fall comes, we better be prepared for sudden cases, and as I have said so many times for months, we have a few months to prepare for that,” Fauci said. “So when that happens, we must be able to do the proper and effective way of identifying, isolating, and tracing contacts.”
Andy is a reporter in Memphis who also contributes to media like Fast Company and The Guardian. When he’s not writing about technology, he can be found protectively hunched over his burgeoning vinyl collection, plus guarding his whovianism and binging on a variety of television shows he probably won’t like.
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