Tag: contact tracing

As Pandemic Surged, Contact Tracing Struggled; Biden Looks to Boost It

Mary Pat Campbell
As Pandemic Surged, Contact Tracing Struggled; Biden Looks to Boost It

Excerpt:

Contact tracing, a critical part of efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, has fallen behind in recent months as covid-19 cases have soared. President Joe Biden had pledged to change that.

Biden proposes hiring 100,000 people nationwide as part of a new public health jobs corps. They would help with contact tracing and facilitate vaccination. Experts said it’s not clear that would be enough tracers to keep up with another surge in covid cases, even if the vaccination rate increases at the same time.

As with everything covid right now — testing, vaccinations and hospital capacity — ramping up contact tracing has become a race against time as new, more contagious variants of the virus threaten to accelerate transmission of the disease.

Author(s): Yves Smith and Steve Findlay

Publication Date: 11 February 2021

Publication Site: naked capitalism

The NFL’s Covid-19 Finding That Saved the Season

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/super-bowl-nfl-covid-cdc-11612104460?fbclid=IwAR3Vw7GGYCX7CGfh3zfxRHzj7mMXmQSGIQADdUGsqkxaHzq6aldnckpk_YQ

Excerpt:

The NFL was slowly discovering something far deeper: a core tenet of Covid-19 transmission wisdom—how to define when individuals are in “close contact”—was just wrong. 

The safety of interactions during this global pandemic had been for months measured by a stopwatch and a tape measure. The guidance was that someone had been exposed to the virus if they had been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes. It was drilled into everyone for so long it became coronavirus gospel. 

But that wasn’t proving true during the NFL’s outbreaks. People were testing positive for the virus even though they had spent far less than 15 minutes or weren’t within six feet of an infectious person—and the league had the contact-tracing technology to prove it. 

Authors: Andrew Beaton and Louise Radnofsky

Publication Date: 31 January 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal