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“It’s very shocking that so many people get a phone call to tell them they have Covid-19. We give them a few hours to think about who they’ve seen, but it can be overwhelming,” said Kim Sayers, a contact tracker. with the HSE.
She is part of a team of 280 contact trackers who make 800 tracing calls every day at centers in Galway, Limerick, Dublin and Cork. The HSE is actively recruiting 550 dedicated contact trackers.
“A call is when someone is receiving a positive diagnosis. These calls are usually made by doctors,” said Paul Gillen, who was the shift leader on the HSE national screening team this week, which is on the campus of the NUI in Galway.
“A call two is when we call those people to get their close contacts, and a call three is when we call those close contacts to inform them.”
Ms Sayers said that the Covid-19 app, which has now been downloaded by 1.3 million users, has supported contact tracing work, detecting people who may have been lost by tracking close contacts.
“The application provides an additional comfort level that we have detected in other people, if someone does not give a name or does not remember meeting someone, the application will send an alert to a person to tell them that they have been a close contact.”
The Galway team has dedicated a number of staff to dealing with positive cases in schools. Although 64 schools have had public health risk assessments and 30 have had class or pod tests since the beginning of the school term, the detection rate has been low with only a handful of positive cases so far.
“Relative to the 1 million children going back to school, the numbers have been low,” according to Dr. Sarah Doyle, HSE Clinical Lead for the Contact Management Program.
Contact trackers are currently contacting close contacts of about five or six people per positive case, but some cases can have up to 50 close contacts.
Examples of cases that result in a large number of close contacts include workplaces, family gatherings, and school settings.
“At the moment, the average number of contacts per positive case is between five and six,” said Dr. Doyle.
“The median is a little lower. What that tells us is that there are a small number of people who have a lot of connections.”
Among the more complex calls for trackers are those involving migrant workers where English is not their first language, and an interpreter is required to join the call.
“We would call them to give them a positive diagnosis, and there was great fear about what would happen next, would I tell my employer?” said contact tracker Triona Fehily, on secondment from her job as a senior occupational therapist.
Some of those cases were further complicated by the workers’ living arrangements, who may have been sharing accommodation and having spouses or partners working in a healthcare setting – a “double whammy” for contact trackers, the official added. Mrs. Fehily.
Contact tracker Siobhan Lawlor, who is an Environmental Health officer, said calls vary widely, from asymptomatic young cases to older people who may be very upset with the diagnosis and need more time to digest the news and work out the next steps.
“Last week I was on a call for an hour and a half, almost two hours with an older person who was alone, in her own home, and quite upset on the phone. Try to be compassionate with her, as she goes through the assessment and guidelines with them, “
Monica Coughlan is among 80 NUIG staff volunteers who were trained by the HSE to work as contact trackers, temporarily leaving her job as a librarian at the university. She also said that many people needed reassurance and help finding a way to isolate themselves.
“There were many scenarios where people could not completely isolate themselves, they were very distressed,” he said.
While the contact tracker team knows that their work is critical, those in other parts of the HSE are concerned about the work they have left behind.
Ms. Feehily said she is concerned about her OT patients: “There is great concern among all therapy staff who have been reassigned to contact tracing.
“While we recognize the importance of this work and it is essential to the national interest, there is a whole cohort of people who are not receiving services because we are here to trace contacts.”
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