But with only two weeks to go, many parts of the country don't have contact tracing teams that are up to speed enough to reopen places, according to experts.
Many experts believe the US is nowhere near where it needs to be in its ability to contact trace Covid-positive people and those they've been in contact with. Other countries, like South Korea, have found contact tracing to be an effective method to contain their coronavirus outbreak.
"Both state public health and county local public health do not have the resources or the people that are needed to be able to do contact tracing for all identified cases," Cicero said."So, we felt that it was important to highlight that as a critical gap and try to quantify how shorthanded are we for the contact tracing workforce."
"It has to be an absolute pillar of the response going forward. If we can get the case counts down ... to a manageable number, contact tracing is a far cleaner, far more surgical solution to keeping transmission low than really anything else at our disposal in this country," Rutherford told CNN. The city government and public health department partnered with University of California San Francisco to start a contact tracing program for the city. Rutherford led a group of public health professionals from UCSF that normally work overseas but whose projects are now on hold due to the pandemic to get them trained and working on the city's contact tracing efforts. UCSF staff are trained public health professionals, so they were able to get up to speed quickly, he said.
Massachusetts started a state-wide contact tracing initiative at the beginning of April, contracting with Partners In Health, a Boston-based non-profit organization that focuses on global public health issues. The Community Tracing Collaborative aims to hire 1,000 contact tracers to track contacts of all Covid-19 positive patients across the state and to support individuals in quarantine.
Paull's center has started a contact tracing team in Falls River, an economically depressed area with a large homeless population in the state's southeast region.
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