The job of contact tracing can include detective work. During the Ebola break out in West Africa in 2014, a hand-drawn map on the wall of a rural center in Liberia showed health workers how to get to a remote town where a female with Ebola may have traveled.
Kelly McEvers/NPR.
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Kelly McEvers/NPR.
The job of contact tracing can involve investigator work. Throughout the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, a hand-drawn map on the wall of a rural clinic in Liberia showed health workers how to get to a remote village where a lady with Ebola might have taken a trip.
Kelly McEvers/NPR.
In the remote part of Liberia where Panjabi’s group was working, contact tracers were hired to examine each Ebola case and track down all the “contacts” of those diagnosed cases.
To get Ebola you have to have close physical contact with the infected person or their physical fluids so the overall number of at-risk contacts was far lower than with COVID-19
As the U.S. looks to consist of the coronavirus so that the economy can begin to resume, Raj Panjabi says contact tracing could be a win-win.
