I Enrolled in a Coronavirus Contact Tracing Academy

So on Monday, when the nation’s first online course in coronavirus contact tracing went live, I signed up and dove in.As with testing and acquiring personal protective equipment, the federal government has left the challenge of recruiting and training an army of new contact tracers up to state and local public health departments. Contact tracers, she says, have to move just as quickly to break the chain of transmission.Every agency has its own protocols, but here are the basics: Every day, hospitals and clinics report any new positive tests to their local public health department. Officials from multiple public health agencies told me they hope to be able to send people out into the real world to track down hard-to-locate individuals once their agencies have acquired the appropriate masks and other protective gear to ensure the tracers can do it safely.The concept of contact tracing is nearly as old as the field of epidemiology itself, but it’s only been in use as a public health intervention since roughly the 1950s. Cuomo told The Washington Post this week that the online course is a “key component of our program that will provide tracers with the tools to effectively trace Covid-19 cases at the scale we need to fight this pandemic.”California recently announced a partnership between its state public health department, UC San Francisco, and UC Los Angeles to create a 20-hour Covid-19 contact tracing “virtual training academy” to help the state reach the goal of having 20,000 tracers at its disposal. Eric Bullard, Dean of Continuing Education and UCLA Extension, told me that the $8.7 million project, which is being funded by the California Department of Public Health, will ramp up to train 3,000 new contact tracers per week from now through the beginning of July. “It’s vital for reopening the state of California,” says Bullard.In Washington, the state public health department surveyed local health agencies in April and learned that the state had 630 contact tracers working on Covid-19. But according to a recent statement from the National Association of County and City Health Officials, states should plan on having 30 contact tracers per 100,000 residents during a pandemic. The group has produced a workforce calculator to help local health agencies figure out how many tracers they need to hire.In a letter to Congress last month, first obtained by National Public Radio, two former federal health officials estimated that until a vaccine becomes available, the US workforce needs to increase by 180,000 contact tracers.