Johns Hopkins To Offer Free Five-Hour Class To Teach People How To Become Contact Tracers
Contact tracing is viewed as one of the key components of reopening the country. But building the massive workforce needed to make the efforts effective will be a Herculean task for overstretched public health departments.
ABC News:
Want To Be A Contact Tracer? Johns Hopkins Is Offering A Free Course
A five-hour online course created by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health could become the backbone of the country's contact tracer training program. The class, which rolled out Monday, offers online instruction to anyone who wants to learn the basics of contact tracing: the process of identifying and isolating people who have been infected with COVID-19 and their close contacts. Its goal is to help limit the spread of the new coronavirus. (Schumaker, 5/11)
The Hill:
Johns Hopkins Offering Free Class In How To Become A Contact Tracer
"In this introductory course, students will learn about the science of SARS-CoV-2 , including the infectious period, the clinical presentation of COVID-19, and the evidence for how SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted from person-to-person and why contact tracing can be such an effective public health intervention," reads the course description. "Students will learn about how contact tracing is done, including how to build rapport with cases, identify their contacts, and support both cases and their contacts to stop transmission in their communities." (Bowden, 5/11)
The Wall Street Journal:
New Johns Hopkins Course To Train Coronavirus Contact Tracers
Emily Gurley, an associate scientist at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, said it is still beneficial to do contact tracing even when there are hundreds of positive diagnoses daily and there may not be sufficient numbers of tracers to reach every newly diagnosed person. “It’s not an all-or-nothing gain,” she said of contact tracing. Contact tracing, as well as wider coronavirus testing in the general population, are key elements to limiting the spread of Covid-19 and reopening New York, state and local officials have said. (West, 5/11)
In other tracking news —
The New York Times:
App Shows Promise In Tracking New Coronavirus Cases, Study Finds
In the absence of widespread on-demand testing, public health officials across the world have been struggling to track the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in real time. A team of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom says a crowdsourcing smartphone app may be the answer to that quandary. In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers found that an app that allows people to check off symptoms they are experiencing was remarkably effective in predicting coronavirus infections among the 2.5 million people who were using it between March 24 and April 21. (Jacobs, 5/11)
The New York Times:
California’s Plan To Trace Travelers For Virus Faltered When Overwhelmed, Study Finds
In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, the United States, like many countries, had a very brief chance to limit the spread of the disease at its borders. Identifying travelers from high-risk countries and tracing their contacts with others would have been critical measures, if put in place early enough. In California, the largest state and a point of entry for thousands of travelers from Asia, a program was established to do just that. But its tracing system was quickly overwhelmed by a flood of passengers, many with inaccurate contact information, and was understaffed in some cases, rendering the program ineffective, according to a study released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which looked exclusively at California. (Waldstein, 5/11)
WBUR:
In Oregon Town, Volunteers Are Going Door-To-Door To Pin Down Coronavirus Infections
While authorities across the U.S. struggle to make policy without any hard numbers for how many people are actually infected with the coronavirus, Oregon State University has launched a project to change that — at least for one small city. The project is known as TRACE, Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics, and its leader, Ben Dalziel, says it has a straightforward goal: "To understand the prevalence of the virus in a community. In this case, Corvallis, Oregon." (Palca, 5/11)
