“Are you okay?”: On-site using NYC Contact Tracer

Ortiz tried to put him in a fold.

“It’s a mixed bag.” This month, when I approached the Queen’s apartment this month, Ortis (30 years old) said, “Some people are really grateful. It seems they are trying to get it done.”

“But in some cases, there may be clients who slam the door.”

It’s a field activity, though it seems to be the largest contact tracking task in a US city, with over 3,000 people calling, knocking on doors, and confirming people’s health and isolation.

Democrat Mayor Bill de Brascio praised the effort as “a great success so far.” After the June milestone began, the city now says it has reached about 90% of all newly diagnosed people and has reached the goal of completing interviews in 75%.

However, in the first two months of the program, over 11,000 infected individuals (more than half of all new cases) did not provide the names of others who may have been exposed. Once people identified their contacts, the tracer ended interviews with 6 in 10. This has not reached the city’s goals. The city has yet to say what it is collecting about its fast-paced connections and potential sources of exposure.

The state and city contact tracking programs in the United States are difficult to compare because they release very different things, but some public health scholars are promising, according to a New York report. Still, some outside experts have suggested that New York needs to get more from its initiatives.

“The way to hear metrics and progress descriptions is like their work being done after creating these contacts. But it’s not a mission accomplishment at all,” says Epidemiology Professor at City University of New York. Dr Dennis Nash says. He feels that cities are missing the opportunity to assess people’s success by separating themselves, and scouts exposure patterns to “assess where and how big the holes in the safety net are.” To do.

Program Director Dr. Tedlong acknowledges that there is still a lot to be done. But Long, a doctor and executive at Health + Hospitals, the city’s hospital system, said Tracer’s efforts prevent thousands of cases of coronavirus and keep new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths at relatively low levels. It is estimated that it was useful for. One day in April, there were more than 6,000 newly confirmed cases. With a much higher number of tests, it currently averages around 200 per day.

“It tells me that what we’re doing is working,” Long said.

Tracking contacts is an old-fashioned public health technique, but pandemics are subject to rigor around the world. The stakes are particularly pronounced for US cities, which have killed more at COVID-19 than any other city, but their outbreaks address relative control at the end of this spring.

Tracer Maryama Diaw says that when she calls from her East Harlem apartment, she strives to “not just read the script, but be sensitive, caring, and actually speaking as a human being.”

She recalls that when a woman was assaulted when she was told she had a positive response, she remembered and set aside a question asking, “Are you okay?”

“We talked a bit like people, people,” said Diaw, a 25-year-old public health graduate student. “For me, it was really rewarding as I actually helped them to make it a very difficult day for them, knowing that she left the phone with the necessary resources. I am.”

New York tracers also offer assistance that can include food delivery and free hotel rooms.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the country will need about 100,000 tracers. By the end of July, the total had exceeded 41,000, according to a survey by NPR and Johns Hopkins University.

According to experts, tracking in the United States has been hampered by a number of factors, including the resurgence of coronaviruses, patchwork state-by-state approaches, and stubborn delays in test results.

“We are not in a good place,” says Lori Tremmel Freema, CEO of the US County and City Health Authorities. However, “New York City is a bright spot.”

The city already had hundreds of people tracking HIV and other infections before the pandemic. However, COVID-19 has raised its work to “an unprecedented scale,” said Demetre Daskalakis, deputy director of the Health Commission.

New York City seems to have the largest city-level programs. By comparison, 2,600 tracers cover almost all of the larger Los Angeles counties. Chicago currently has more than 200 tracers and expects that number to increase to about 800 by mid-September. Houston said it hired 300 people this spring.

The LA County Department of Health says the program is “good” as it completed interviews in about half of all new cases and nearly two-thirds of all contacts. However, as in New York, excluding this situation would increase the percentage of people without a phone number.

New York, with 2,000 out-of-state tracers, accounts for about 90% of newly diagnosed people and nearly 88% of contacts, state official Larry Schwartz said. The percentage of completed interviews is unknown.

In the neighboring state of New Jersey, during the first week of August, we interviewed seven out of ten newly diagnosed states across the state, saying that half of those who wanted to talk were contacted. Connecticut official Josh Jevale said the state has recently reached 90% of new cases within 48 hours, finished interviews, and received half to two-thirds of contacts. Told.

While such criteria are valid, they do not show how traces affect coronavirus infections, says Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

As an HIV contact tracer before the coronavirus pandemic, Ortiz affects everyday life just as it did when knocking on the Queens apartment door.

Ortiz said the infected person professed that he was unaware that the tracer was calling. The tracer promised to call for a full interview in order to shorten the doorway conversations to protect privacy and limit exposure.

“By the time I left, they were already holding their cell phones,” Ortiz said. “It’s definitely a good sign.”

Associated Press video journalist Robert Bumstead (New York) and authors Marina Villeneuve (Albany, NY) and Susan Hi (Hartford, CT) contributed to the report.

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