24 NEWSWEEK.COM
AS STATES LOOSEN UP ON SOCIAL DISʝ
tancing rules, people aren’t the only
thing that will go back to work—so
will the virus. Removing restrictions
will allow the pathogen to move more
freely through the population, possi-
bly causing a second wave of illness
that threatens to overwhelm hospital
resources and drive death rates higher.
The key to avoid lurching from one
lockdown to another, experts say, is
contact tracing. When a patient tests
positive to COVID-19, health-care
workers would reach out to all the peo-
ple who might have been exposed be-
fore the patient became ill and advise
them to self-quarantine. The idea is to
extinguish small pockets of new cases
before they explode into big outbreaks
like the ones that steamrolled New
York City and New Orleans last month.
Governors, in an effort to balance
the need to let people go back to work
and keep them safe from a pandemic
virus that continues to circulate, have
begun putting contact-tracing programs
in place. Massachusetts has hired 1000
people for its program, which started
in early April, and many states have
recently announced plans to follow suit.
Piecemeal efforts, however, may not
be sufɿcient. What’s needed is a mo-
bilization of the health-care workforce
that reʀects the wartime-footing the
nation now ɿnds itself in in battling the
pandemic, says Crystal Watson, senior
scholar and assistant professor at Johns
Hopkins Center for Health Security.
To avoid a resurgence, Watson and
a team of health-care policy experts
have concluded, the states will need
about 100,000 health-care workers to
do the gumshoe work of contact tracing,
at a cost of about $3.6 billion. Theyhave taken their plan to congressional
leaders in hope of a ɿnancing bill.
“We need funding,” she says. “We
need a call to action. We need to rally
around this initiative. And we need
guidance and technical support from
agencies like the CDC for state and local
health departments who are going to
be doing this work. I haven’t seen those
things put in place yet and that’s what
we need to really make this effective.”
Newsweek spoke with Watson about
how the plan would work and why it’s
needed.Q: Your plan calls for a big operation
to be put into place quickly.
A: This is unprecedented. It’s going to be
an initiative, if we can get it going, like
no other we’ve ever had in this countryfor public health. This would be an
incredible expansion of the workforce
for public health.
During the Ebola epidemic, Liberian
ofɿcials hired about a thousand people
to do contact tracing. In the end, it was
fairly successful, because by the time the
department of defense brought in their
mobile hospitals and set everything up,
the cases had pretty much diminished
because of those public health efforts.
There are other countries that are doing
this already for the COVID-19 pandemic.Q: How would it work?
A: If you get sick with COVID-19, you
would expect to have a call from a con-
tact tracer from the health department
to talk to you about your illness and
ask you who you were in contact with
during the course of your illness, and
possibly even a few days before, since
[the virus] can transmit pre-symptom-
atically. The contact tracer would then
reach out to your friends and family
and even more random contacts that
you may have had out in public.Q: Who would be enlisted to do the work?
A: Not just public health and health
care professionals. It would potentially
mean reaching out to people who are
retired, people who have expertise in
public health that are maybe not inthe key to opening up the us safely
is a wartime mobilization to trace all
new covid-19 cases. by Fred Guterl“We need to
RALLY AROUN D
this initiative”
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