The New York City contact tracking team will be put to the test during the winter amid a further spike in Covid-19 cases that is expected to continue during the holiday season.
Although the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines has given New Yorkers hope that the worst part of the pandemic will end in 2021, the city has yet to go through a difficult winter. The seven-day average of new and likely cases of Covid-19 in New York exceeded 3,000 in most of December, compared with about 250 new cases daily in early September.
Ted Long, executive director of the city’s Covid-19 Test and Trace Corps, said his team is preparing for this moment. The corps has added 1,000 members since the summer, and now has a total of 4,000 employees.
“We have a team and we are ready to handle all cases during the outbreak,” said Dr. Long.
Contact tracking remains one of the most important tools for public health officials to contain the spread of Covid-19. The city’s contact tracker team contacts people who have tested positive for Covid-19 and others who may have been exposed to notify them that they should be quarantined to prevent others from becoming ill. They also offer help for people to have access to medical care and offer free accommodation in a hotel if they are unable to isolate themselves at home.
A New York City test and tracking body worker distributed masks and information at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal last month.
Photograph:
brendan mcdermid / Reuters
The city’s contact tracking program got off to a rough start, but it has improved. During the first weeks of the program in June, only half of the people reached by contact trackers completed the admission process, which involves answering a series of questions, according to the Test and Tracking team. Now, three out of four people are completing their intake.
Only 35% of people reached by contact trackers gave the names and information of people they may have exposed during the first two weeks of the program in June, according to the Test and Tracking team. Now, 64% of people who complete the admission process are sharing contact information and about 18% report that they had no contacts to share because they had no significant recent personal interactions, said Dr. Long.
Dr. Long said his team focused on hiring contact trackers who lived in the neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic to build trust in these communities and get more people to cooperate with tracking. They are also sending people to track personal contact when someone cannot be reached over the phone. And at city-run test facilities, contact trackers are available to start the process if someone does a quick test and tests positive.
Robert Amler, dean of the School of Health Sciences and Practice at New York Medical College, said many of the results of the city’s Testing and Tracking team are impressive. A response rate of 64% of people who contact is good and comparable to other, not so severe outbreaks of other diseases, he said. The percentage of people who complete the intake – about 75% of the people reached – is “very, very good,” he said.
While New York City has done well to reach people, the job may become more difficult in the coming weeks, said Amanda Castel, professor in the department of epidemiology at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.
“As we move through the pandemic, I think what we are seeing is a little bit of the Covid fatigue that we see in people’s behavior, we are also seeing it in terms of being able to reach individuals and really get complete information about their potential contacts and reach those contacts too, ”said Dr. Castel.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said New York’s public schools will be closed on Thursday and will move to totally remote education. The city reached the average positivity rate limit of 3% Covid-19 in seven days to stop face-to-face education. (Originally published on November 18) Photo: Wang Ying / Xinhua / Zuma Press
Other parts of the three state region are already struggling with this. In New Jersey, nearly 80% of people reached by contact trackers refuse to provide the names and information of people they potentially exposed to Covid-19.
The steady increase in infection rates will also be a challenge, increasing the workload of the city’s contact tracking team. Jackie Bray, deputy executive director of New York City’s Test and Trace Corps, said the program has increased over the summer to avoid having to hire and train during a second wave.
“They have months of work in the workplace and are really ready when we have a lot more boxes and the systems we are using are more stressed,” said Bray.
Casey de Pont, 35, said she was recently contacted by the city’s contact tracking team after attending a meeting in the Brooklyn yard, where a person later tested positive for Covid-19. After her initial phone call with the contact tracker, she later received a care package from the contact tracking program that included hand sanitizer and masks, as well as a homemade Covid-19 test kit.
By the time she received the care package, Ms. De Pont had already tested negative on two Covid-19 tests and did not need to use the home test. She plans to keep it in case she needs a test in the future, she said.
Ms. De Pont said she was happy to cooperate with contact trackers and feels that it is important for the public to share contacts, if they have been potentially exposed to Covid-19.
“I could understand how invasive this looks, but we are in mitigating circumstances now,” said de Pont. “So there are some things that are uncomfortable, you just have to do it.”
—Melanie Grayce West contributed to this article.
Write to Joseph De Avila at [email protected]
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