Hey America, What Happened to Contact Tracing?
Unused tech tools and a coordination vacuum between state and local health departments can help explain why contact tracing is not going well
In mid-June, the latest study to model the effects of public health interventions on the ebb and flow of Covid-19 infections affirmed what public health experts have long suspected: Contact tracing is central to controlling this pandemic. Using a model based on real-world social contact data from the United Kingdom, the study’s authors found that even if people socially distanced themselves to only a moderate degree, a vigorous contact tracing effort could reduce viral spread by two-thirds and ultimately snuff out transmission.
The United States has been providing federal funding for contact tracing since the Department of Health and Human Services announced its first wave of financial support for the strategy in late April. But the implementation of contact tracing programs has unfolded in wildly uneven ways across the nation: In some states, such as Washington, California, and Massachusetts, massive programs employing thousands of workers are reaching enormous numbers of Covid-19-infected people and their contacts, while in others, public health leaders are still dithering over such a program’s best…
