San Francisco revealed a public health outreach strategy Wednesday suggested to assist the city quickly test and determine individuals freshly infected with the coronavirus, and to locate anybody they might have had contact with who might likewise become ill.
The program is indicated to augment the city’s contact tracing efforts, which are a long-standing tool of public health to battle infectious disease outbreaks.
Contact tracing involves interviewing individuals who evaluate favorable for the infection about their recent interactions with others and their movements in public. The interviewers then call anyone who might have been exposed and recommend them to take certain safety measures to halt the spread of illness.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that contact tracing and prevalent screening will be essential to lifting some of the limitations on everyday life enforced nearly a month back through state and local shelter-in-place orders. Once people resume connecting with others, the hope is that contact tracing will assist stop future break outs of COVID-19
Contact tracing “is an essential public health tool, and we are scaling it up,” Dr. Grant Colfax, head of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said in a news briefing Wednesday.
” From the start of this pandemic, we have actually highlighted contact tracing.
San Francisco’s broadened program, developed with UCSF, includes training lots and ultimately numerous workers to speak with individuals who are freshly contaminated, investigate those cases, and reach people who have been exposed. The process is designed to secure the privacy of individuals who are contaminated and those who are at threat of ending up being ill.
People who are close contacts of the initial case and thought about at high danger of becoming contaminated will be asked to quarantine themselves and be monitored over 14 days. San Francisco is utilizing a brand-new digital tool made by Massachusetts software application business Dimagi to aid with that tracking.
Workers associated with the program will keep everyday interaction– by phone or text– with the people they have contacted. They will inquire about signs and connect individuals with coronavirus screening and health care as required.
Up until now, 50 people have been trained by UCSF to do the work. They include San Francisco librarians and personnel from the general public Health Department and city attorney’s office– a lot of whom are not working their typical jobs at the minute– and UCSF medical trainees. Colfax stated he hopes to have 100 more trained over the next few weeks.
And he wish to see the program expand across the Bay Area, ultimately including hundreds or countless freshly trained workers to do the contact tracing.
Eventually, contact tracing could need an enormous labor force throughout the state. More online trainings are continuing in San Francisco, which could be a design for the rest of California. Massachusetts started an extensive coronavirus contact tracing program this month and stated it was the very first state to do so.
” We wish to get all the kinks out of it so it can be exportable to all the counties in California,” stated Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious illness specialist at UCSF who has led San Francisco’s contact tracing program.
Once people who have encountered a contaminated person comprehend why they are looking out, “they tend to be pretty grateful that someone is focusing on them,” he stated.
Carolyn Said and Erin Allday are San Francisco Chronicle personnel writers. Email: [email protected], [email protected] Twitter: @csaid @erinallday
