CHAMPAIGN — Wanted: Contact tracers.
Pay: $15 an hour.
The job: Helping rein in a raging pandemic with no end in sight.
The use of contact tracers by public-health agencies to help control the spread of infectious diseases isn’t new. But COVID-19 has created an urgent need for many more people to do the job.
As of late July, the American Medical Association called for at least 100,000 additional contact tracers in the U.S. as states continued to lift restrictions intended to control the spread of coronavirus.
Part of the job of contact tracing is to interview by phone people who have tested positive for COVID-19, then call the people with whom they’ve been in close contact and deliver the news nobody wants to hear — that they’re going to need to stay home for two weeks and away from other people.
“Nobody wants to be in quarantine,” said Shenecia Walker, a contact tracer for the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District.
New COVID-19 cases continue to pile up, and with the recent surge, “it’s been kind of crazy,” Walker said.
“All of us are really trying to get through it all, and it’s so much, so many cases, it’s impossible,” she said.
Who are close contacts of infected people? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that’s anyone they have been within 6 feet of for 15 minutes or more, including up to 48 hours before they develop symptoms or test positive.
While nobody may want to be in isolation or quarantine, here’s a reason to consider doing it anyway:
“It is estimated that each infected person can, on average, infect two to three others,” said a report by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “This means that if one person spreads the virus to three others, that first positive case can turn into more than 59,000 cases in 10 rounds of infections.”
The health district jumped on contact tracing early in the pandemic and currently has a staff of 76 in its operation — plus nine more contact tracers about to start, according to Administrator Julie Pryde.
Hiring is ongoing, especially with the expectation that new positive cases are going to escalate even more as people are confined indoors through the winter and ignore advice to refrain from gathering for the holidays, she said.
“I’m going to keep hiring and keep hiring and keep hiring as many as I can, because we’re going into a nightmare,” Pryde said.
The Vermilion County Health Department has been handling all its contact tracing with pre-pandemic staff, but the surge in cases there has made it difficult to keep up, according to Administrator Doug Toole.
He hopes to get some new contact tracers hired, trained and on the job before the holiday season.
Early on in the pandemic, Toole recalled, health officials had no idea what they were getting into. Had he known then what he knows now, he said, he would have asked for different resources.
“Nobody said to us, ‘Imagine this is going to get worse every month,’” he said.
The Douglas County Health Department just hired two more contact tracers, and including its three nurses, now has a staff of 15 contact tracers on the job, according to spokeswoman Summer Phillips.
The new staff members are helping the health department keep up with contact tracing within normal hours for the first time, she said.
“We try to let them know how important the work is that they’re doing, because it is not always easy,” Phillips said.
‘Six out of 10 are cooperative’ Walker, who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration, joined the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District as a contract tracer this past July and became a contact-tracing team lead by the end of August.
It’s not the most stressful job she’s ever had — that was cleaning hotel rooms, she said — but there are challenges to doing this work.
Responses from people being called range from a willingness to cooperate to angry refusals.
“I would say six out of 10 are cooperative,” Walker said. “The other four are definitely not.”
Some of what contact tracers encounter are people who won’t pick up the phone or return calls and have to be called repeatedly, some who believe the call isn’t legitimate, some who think the pandemic is fake, some who won’t provide the names for their close contacts and some who make it clear they won’t cooperate with a quarantine.
“One guy was so mad, the ‘F’ word was every other word,” Walker recalled. “I say, ‘I understand, sir, but I’m sorry, you still have to be on quarantine.’”
But there are also the nicer people who appreciate the calls, Walker said.
“A lot of elderly people like talking to us,” she said.
Contact tracers don’t just put people in quarantine. They also answer questions, provide guidance and keep in touch with the people they contact. People in quarantine get daily check-in calls, unless they request a text or email instead, and some older adults are even reluctant to see that end, Walker said.
Those check-in calls or texts include four questions, she said:
- Have you taken your temperature today?
- Do you have any symptoms?
- Have you left the house in the past 24 hours?
- Do you need anything?
The health district responds to those needs by supplying most of them, she said. Staff members have delivered boxes of food, disposable diapers, thermometers, prescription medications, cleaning supplies and toilet paper — but have had to decline requests to provide alcohol, Walker said.
Phillips, who has helped with contact tracing in Douglas County, said probably three-quarters of the people contacted cooperate.
One major issue is that so many people won’t answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize, she said.
She understands, she said, but she’d also appreciate it if people would set up their voicemail and return calls to the health department.
She’d also like people to know contact tracers can only call close contacts of infected people when those people share the names — which some infected people are reluctant to do.
While the infected person’s name isn’t shared with his or her close contacts, Phillips said, “I think there is a fear on behalf of several I’ve spoken with, who did not feel comfortable sharing another person’s name and information because they did not want them to be told that they needed to quarantine for 14 days.”
‘We can’t put you in jail’For those considering becoming contact tracers, Walker said, you need to have patience, confidence and the ability to handle confrontation. Moms and older people tend to have an easier time being able to tell people what they need to do, she said.
“We tell a lot of people we can’t police you, we can’t put you in jail, but we would appreciate it if you would cooperate with us,” Walker said.
Her request to those being called by contact tracers: Leave politics out of this and realize it’s for the sake of your health.
“If we could get the community to work with us and quarantine when we ask them to, I’m sure it would stop the surge in this county,” she said.
Pryde adds a request of her own.
“Please be nice to the people when they call you,” she urged. “They’re doing their job, and they’re trying to put this pandemic down as much as we can.”
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