[ad_1]
Zurich’s contact tracker problems aren’t primarily their faults. Rather, the governing council has to ask questions.
JDMT contact trackers operate from a commercial property in Pfäffikon.
“The corona virus is always ahead,” Zurich’s health director Natalie Rickli said recently in front of the cantonal council. Probably true. But now the backlog of orders from Zurich is getting bigger, infections have risen rapidly for about two weeks. So far one has been able to comfort oneself with this with reference to the fact that especially the very young are infected and that hospitalizations are stagnating. But now older people are affected again as well, and hospital admissions jumped last week.
Under these circumstances, it’s no wonder that JDMT’s tracers have reached their limits. They had to adapt their procedures and stop calling the contacts of infected people. After all, the government once told the team that they should be prepared for around 100 infections a day. For comparison: Last Saturday, no fewer than 271 cases were reported to trackers in the Zurich Oberland and at the airport for follow-up. This is why you may have some understanding when the head of the contact tracker asks potential contact persons to report to the hotline and not wait for a call.
However, the condition is really unsatisfactory. Because with all the diligence and goodwill one can attest to the police and medical students: sending SMS and emails and counting on the contact persons to quarantine and contact the hotline if they have any questions – that does not fit with summer Government-propagated image of persistent virus detective constantly tracking and interrupting chains of infection. The probability of not catching everyone is increasing, and this is concerning given that tracing, with testing and isolation, is one of the pillars of the fight against pandemics. This is the only way to avoid severe restrictions that would cost the economy and society dearly.
This raises fundamental questions about the strategy of the governing council. For example, if you weren’t too stingy when ordering and equipping your equipment and you shouldn’t have included a bad weather scenario like this one. When the federal task force carried out a cost-benefit analysis for contact tracing in the spring, it assumed that around 2,000 people would be needed for all of Switzerland. For the canton of Zurich, that would be around 350 employees, about a third more than it will be now, after repeated increases.
It goes without saying that it is still up to the citizens to make a contribution and follow the rules of hygiene and distance. To fight a pandemic, it is also imperative that patients get tested for the Sars-CoV-2 virus as soon as possible if they have symptoms. In September, an average of two and a half days elapsed between the first appearance of symptoms and the smear. Faster tests would help speed up the entire complex monitoring process. Anyway, there are quite a few problems. In three out of four infected people, it is impossible to determine where they were infected. The example of the salsa scene shows how great the effort is to discover bunches. Many of those affected initially did not clearly identify the site of infection. Only after extensive investigations by the trackers could 60 cases be assigned.
But there is no way to prevent the governing council from further increasing contact tracing and providing the team with the resources it needs for a situation like this one. Because the virus can always be ahead. But it has to be within reach.
