Workaround: Inside Ambitious Massachusetts Coronavirus Contact Tracking Work

This time we will track it by phone.

Wroe is part of the Partners in Health team responsible for creating an ambitious state contact tracking program announced by Governor Charlie Baker earlier this month. The government, which has allocated $ 44 million to the program, considers contact tracking as an important element of its plan to ultimately open up the economy and allow people to start their business again without fear of infection.

“It feels very similar,” comparing her current project to the public health activities in Africa over the last decades at PIH, “complexity with a terrifying amount of risk to people. Because I have a problem. [particularly in vulnerable communities] And you just have to start and believe it is possible. “

Testing more people than most states, Massachusetts is the first in the United States to initiate contact tracking for this range. The Baker administration has been asked a lot of advice from other states for setting up a similar program, and the authorities are working with the Governor’s Association to provide a one-hour webinar for the project next week.

“We aim to be innovative. We are trying to stay ahead of the virus,” he said.

As soon as the tracking program was announced, it was flooded with resumes. Partners in Health received approximately 25,000 applications in less than a month.

“People really want to help,” Wroe said. Approximately 36 hours after landing in the United States, she signed this effort and took one of the last return flights from Johannesburg, who worked at PIH. She and her five-year-old German shepherd, Bwenge, whose name is Malawi’s mother tongue, Chichewa for “friend,” lived with her aunt and uncle in Byfield.

In less than a month, we hired over 700 people, of course, a training program designed by Partners in Health. The contingency of the new contact tracking unit began making its first phone call on April 12, as part of a “soft launch.” So far, this effort has reached more than 4,500 people, patients, and their contacts.

This number will increase rapidly in the coming weeks, starting May 1, when the program took place, officials said. At that time, all 1,000 staff will be stationed in a virtual call center in the state, trained, and ready to investigate Massachusetts for all those infected with the virus.

A late-night phone call between Governor Baker and one of the co-founders of PIH, formerly the head of the World Bank, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, embodied the concept. Mr Baker said he wanted to know how to continue attacking the virus, rather than “just be together”, he said in an interview with Grove.

Looking around the world, “if you start thinking about ways you can try carefully and carefully to help people get back to work, you need some way to do it with a virus and contain it.” It seemed, Baker said.

The governor remembered sitting in a car parked beside the road. Placement of programs built on this idea of ​​testing and tracing. “

Kim said that this was happening in many Asian countries, and that PIH did to successfully fight infectious diseases such as Ebola and Zika in the world’s poorest places, Kim explained. did.

“To be honest, I was sold,” Baker said. He asked if PIH could help implement the program in Massachusetts, preferring to work with organizations that have done this before. “We are working on a method that is not theory here. It has already been done and has been done well in many other places.”

Contact tracking only works if extensive testing has been done. This is another precedent for the state’s plan to counter the virus that the Baker administration says it is working on. As of Saturday, 226,845 people were tested in Massachusetts, To state data. The state inspection rate per million is ranked as one of the highest in the country.

Dubbing Community trace collaborative, The program works as follows: Each time a Massachusetts resident is positive for coronavirus, the results are shared with one of the team’s case investigators via a secure database. The investigator will call the newly diagnosed person and collect information, including a list of all those with whom the patient was in close contact, starting 48 hours before the onset of symptoms.

“It’s because you can get infected before you have symptoms,” Wroe said.

The case investigator obtains the names and phone numbers of those contacts. Authorities expect about 10 people for each new incident. These are passed to one of the contact tracers. The contact tracer will contact you by phone, ideally within 48 hours and request self-quarantine.

John Welch, a senior nurse anesthesiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, said he is lending to PIH for a contact tracking program. This collaboration is working with telecom companies to make it more possible. Now when the tracer calls, the caller ID should pop up as “MA COVID Team” and the number should start with 833 or 857.

Speaking of scripts, the tracer tells each contact that they’ve been infected with a virus and explains how to safely quarantine them at home for 14 days.

Conversation involves checking if people are symptomatic or if they need to be tested, and if there is anything needed to be safely quarantined. If not, the program has a resource coordinator who can connect the person to social services such as food banks and mental health services. The contact tracer continues to check in with others during quarantine.

Labor-intensive, but officials involved in Massachusetts programs say the human element is important.

Welch, who oversees the brigades of contact tracers, said that “power and fear” cannot keep people isolated. He was previously the chief clinical officer of the Ebola hemorrhagic fever response of PIH in Liberia and Sierra Leone during the outbreak that began in 2014. “You have to do it with empathy.”

“The human part is like glue,” says Wroe. “I see you ….. this is horrible and we are here for you despite the phone call.”

Some critics suggest It’s too late Contact tracking to control the spread of coronaviruses. State officials and PIH staff are in strong opposition. Tracking contact can go beyond social distances, reduce the spread of the disease, and bend it downwards, rather than just flattening the curve, they say. This only happens when each infected person spreads the disease to less than one other person.

In addition, the introduction of robust programs will enable countries to respond quickly to future spikes without having to re-block the entire economy.

“That’s the purpose of contact tracing, to help with long-term solutions so we can bring our lives back to a new normal state,” said Wroe.

“We are at COVID at the top of the mountain,” Welch said. He remembered the surprise of the daily Ebola outbreak from around West Africa and wondered, “How will this end?” Thousands of community health workers have moved on foot. He said he cried the day the epidemic was finally declared.

“Without the vision that it would end, we would do nothing, just sit down,” Welch said. Contact traces are effective treatments and vaccines are widely available, especially before you get off the mountain.

“In the meantime, we can do nothing. We have to do these things we know the job,” he said.

Victoria McGrane has [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @vgmac.