Remember in May 2020 when Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced funding for an “army” of contact tracers to combat COVID-19?
Well, armies of government workers aren’t easily disbanded, and we had better hope our real army functions better than our contact tracers.
“At last check, local health departments across the state received approximately $230 million. Community-based organizations are received another $60 million,” according to a new report by CBS Chicago.
Don’t expect it to end as the pandemic ends. The city of Chicago’s contact tracing program is federally funded through June 2022. It received $56 million for two years, according to that report. CBS talked to one administrator of a county program who said that “at this point, we do still see contact policing efforts existing to some extent, until we get to a much better place where we can comfortably say, ‘OK, we’ve got everything under control.'”
Contact tracing is entirely sensible in theory and has been used successfully against other infections.
The problem is that its execution was botched across most of Illinois from the start and, across the country, programs have mostly failed.
Illinois’ initial reopening plan required that, for any region to move from phase three to phase four, the region would need 90% of COVID-19 victims to participate in contact tracing. There’s no way that was ever achievable because it was obvious many victims wouldn’t participate because of privacy concerns. That’s among the reasons why we wrote that the initial reopening plan made no sense. The requirement was quietly dropped later.
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Contact tracers in Chicago are paid $20 to $24 per hour, according to an earlier CBS Chicago story. The program works by having those workers contact victims who identify those with whom they’ve been in contact, who are then warned.
But Chicago fell behind in its hiring, which it attempted to remedy in September by partnering with community service organizations. The program still foundered.
“The city remained short of contact tracers, and COVID victims just didn’t want to cooperate or were hard to reach. From August through late November, the city’s public health investigators managed to reach and interview only about 16% of Chicagoans who’d tested positive,” according to a Chicago Sun-Times report in December.
The failure played out in most but not all counties across Illinois. A November analysis by ABC Chicago showed that, in many counties, fewer than a third of COVID-19 victims had even been reached by contact tracers. As of today, the Illinois Department of Public Health claims that 54% of victims have been reached by a contact tracer.
Some areas did much better — at least in reaching reported COVID-19 victims for an initial interview. The Champaign-Urbana Health District, for example, claims it has reached over 97% of victims in its area. I’ve heard the same anecdotally. A victim there told me he was reached promptly and that the interview was professionally done.
Privacy concerns about contact tracing turn out to be justified, at least in Chicago. This April, City Hall Inspector General Joseph Ferguson reported that more than a quarter of the city of Chicago’s contact tracers who left their jobs as of early this year still had access to patient data for at least a month after their termination.
Illinois isn’t alone with its contact tracing problems. Slate took a look in November at problems across the nation. “America’s contact tracing effort is being hampered by poor data, low trust in public health authorities, and a fragmented workforce,” it reported back then.
New research says the national problems persist. From a health care IT publication: “Contact tracing was largely ineffective in slowing COVID-19 virus transmission and improving population health, mostly due to insufficient interview responses, according to a recent study published in JAMA Network Open.” It goes on to say:
“In an analysis of over 74,000 cases between June and October of 2020 from 13 health departments and one Indian Health Service Unit, researchers found that two of three people with COVID-19 were not reached for an interview or did not name any contacts when interviewed. Public health authorities reached a mean 0.7 contacts by telephone, and only 0.5 contacts per case were adequately monitored.”
But spending on the programs continues.
Mark Glennon is the founder of Wirepoints.
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