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Now is not the time to stop tracking contacts

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The rise of The Delta variant is sparking all sorts of memories — the ongoing debate about the “wave of non-pharmaceutical interventions” such as anxiety, crushing, masking, and moving away from the first wave of Covide in the spring of 2020, concerns about children and schools. It doesn’t seem to lead to a discussion about the tracing of contacts, one of the best hopes of having a pandemic in the early days.

It has often been said that contact tracing is dead. Covid-19 was first identified in the US and four and a half months earlier, The New York Times he said it was failing in many states. And so it was, if failure is the equivalent of not stopping the pandemic. A year later, as the country faces another deadly wave, it seems to have almost completely disappeared from the equation. In early summer, a Covid-19 view JAMA The title “Beyond Tomorrow” outlined four possible outcomes of SARS-CoV-2: elimination, possession, coexistence, and conflict. He made no mention of the tracing of the contacts. Covid final articles in July and August Atlantic and STAT, journalists who directed coronavirus coverage, similarly said nothing to end the pandemic about the role of contact tracing.

There has been a lot of media attention lately: A recently The Kaiser Health News story described the staff hired and an audience tired of the rise of Delta. “The layout of the contacts seems to have fallen by the wayside,” he noted. The story documents fewer workers in states like Arkansas and Texas to warn people that they have been infected with the virus and to give advice on isolation. And Texas ’new budget prohibits state funding to keep track of contacts.

In June of this year, before Delta became the main US strain and seemed to be easing the pandemic, poll The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the NPR found that many states were struggling to trace contacts. But just as masquerading and social alienation are now returning, one must still be in touch with the trajectory. Fighting the world’s newest variant of the virus will require the support of one of the world’s oldest public health practices, which has played an important role in the end of measles and SARS-1, which has been used over the years (along with vaccines and treatments) for tuberculosis, measles, Ebola and more. To be ETS. As efforts are being made to leave the nation behind another wave, the tracing of contacts cannot be allowed to disappear.

From there in the early days of the pandemic, the tracing of contacts has had a rough trend. “It started too late,” says Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health. online course training contact tracers with more than one million registrations worldwide so far. State and local health officials began training in the spring of 2020, but were hampered by a lack of readily available tests; asymptomatic issues were not considered and their relationships were uninformed. Over time, governments have struggled to make contact with the remains, and have proliferated as contact tracers were determined for vaccination efforts when they fell into these welcome containers.

The methods used to track contacts in this pandemic – personal calls and impersonal applications – have been perfect and there are many concerns about privacy. WIRED reported that the use of applications to track contacts it has failed quite a bit In the US. In the UK, people complain of a “pingdemic”; receiving notifications from an application that is so widely used by people on the next floor can receive a message even though they have never been in the same room with the infected person. In one week this summer, 690,000 people in England and Wales received reports of isolation, according to The Washington Post, and companies complained that so many employees stayed at home that they could not stay open. Applications, let’s say, are jobs that are being done.

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