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By July, the county had roughly 100 staffers dedicated to contact tracing for COVID-19 - a fraction of the work force it once devoted to the effort. County had enlisted roughly 2,800 contact tracers to find people who had tested positive and reach out to contacts who they might have exposed. New York City said it was ending its main program this spring.Īt one point, L.A. Many cities have halted or pared back their efforts: Washington, D.C., laid off workers in June, putting an official end to its coronavirus contact tracing program, the Washington Post reported. He argued that the time and money should instead be devoted to other efforts, such as expanding PCR testing for the coronavirus, or redeploying contact tracers to track down monkeypox.Įarlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending universal contact tracing for COVID-19, instead urging health departments to focus such efforts on high-risk settings such as long-term care facilities and jails. Now, “I just don’t see that we’re going to contact trace our way out of this,” Noymer said, especially as people have kept mingling but stopped wearing masks. In March 2020, the thinking was “this is a brand-new pandemic and we can hopefully stop it in its tracks, or blunt the impact and buy people time from spreading it further until we get a vaccine,” said Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine. “Having cases be willing to talk to a case investigator and identify who their contacts are - and then being able to turn around and notify those contacts within 24 to 48 hours - is becoming really challenging.” Garfein, professor at the UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science. “It really shortens the amount of time that you have to get a hold of somebody,” said Richard S. Newer variants appear to have had a shorter period before symptoms arise and have spread more easily. The logistics of actually contacting those people is very difficult. “With communities broadly reopened, it’s very difficult to say how many contacts you had, and even if you can say that, you may have 20 or 30 or 40 contacts. Many more COVID cases are probably never being assigned to contact tracers at all, as many Angelenos rely on home tests that are never reported to the county.Įxperts say that contact tracing, long valued as a tool to quash the spread of viruses, has become an increasingly Sisyphean task in the face of rampant COVID infections, ever-more-contagious subvariants, and an exhausted public.Ĭontact tracing “is not really making the impact that it did at one point,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs with the National Assn.
And even when they have coaxed people to be interviewed, few of those phone calls led to additional conversations with others who they might have exposed, county statistics show.
County contact tracers earlier in the pandemic. This summer, that number has stagnated below 30% in recent weeks - better than during the winter surge, but far below the success rates seen for L.A. In January, amid a crush of cases driven by the Omicron variant, there were weeks when contact tracers were reaching and interviewing less than 10% of their assigned cases, county data show. County contact tracers have struggled to reach and interview people with COVID. She had been sick for days, and by the time she roused herself from bed to get officially tested, it seemed like “by the time they would have done any contact tracing, it would have been so long that those folks would have likely already gotten sick,” the Manhattan Beach resident said.īesides, she said, “I just didn’t feel comfortable sharing my personal experience with the county.”Īs the pandemic has dragged on, L.A. After Julianne Cline went out and got tested for COVID-19 this June, text messages and voicemails soon piled up from Los Angeles County contact tracers who wanted to talk to her.Ĭline, 32, ignored them.