The keys to preventing a second surge of the coronavirus: testing and contact tracing. They’re used to determine who’s COVID-positive, who’s been around them, potentially exposed or even infected
Dr. Judith Lightfoot is the chief of infectious disease at Rowan University’s School of Osteopathic Medicine. Lightfoot says budget cuts since 2008 have left municipal public health departments needing to hire thousands of outreach workers.
Already, Apple, Google and others are recruiting skilled investigators. Morris County’s freeholders are planning to help their 39 municipalities with the enormous task. And, Newark is training contact tracers. Lightfoot says the effort — and hard-hit areas — will need all the support they can get.
“Johns Hopkins quoted needed over 100,000 people just to do this. I think we may need more,” she said.
North Bergen has seven contact tracers now and acknowledges it needs more money to train and hire more.
“To effectively do that we’re going to need a team, a team of minimum 25, 30 individuals,” said Janet Castro, director of the North Bergen Health Department.
Lightfoot said the effort should employ the best of technology — apps and software for contacting and data collecting.
“As that second wave comes and we identify those early cases early on, as that first case becomes positive, that public health workers or that person with boots on the ground, or if that technology is in place, we can identify right then and there – we have a COVID-19, where were you? Where do you work? Were you home? Who were you around? Then the contact tracers can then begin their work effectively,” Lightfoot said.
Another issue since the outbreak’s outset: testing kits, or the lack of them. More will be needed data collecting.
“We’re playing catch up. We’re trying to get enough testing kits out,” she said.
Another challenge: reliable results that Lightfoot doubts will come from the discomfort of self-testing.
“They’re not going to really push back as far as a health care worker’s going to do because it’s going to be uncomfortable. So, we know that if you don’t get enough of the viral particles, that test may read negative. So, the answer to your question, now that we know, we’re going to have to have testing sites everywhere — physicians’ offices, probably your apothecaries, the local Rite Aids, CVS, Walgreens, the urgent care centers — to take the pressure off the hospitals and the immediate testing centers,” Lightfoot said.
Everyone knows it will cost hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars to contact trace. The tri-state area effort got a $10 million boost last week from billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
The Murphy administration is drafting a plan to begin contact tracing.
“The work that our communicable disease service has done shows that we need 81 contact tracers for ever 100,000 population,” said New Jersey Department of Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli.
The challenge with getting anything done at any level of government can be commitment — even in a pandemic with so much at stake.
“I think that now there is a commitment to do this,” Lightfoot said.
