The Omicron variant of COVID-19 continues to rise in the United States, with new cases jumping 185% in the past two weeks and the number of daily cases rising to more than 760,000.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that Omicron “will eventually find just about everyone” as the highly infectious variant continues to spread among those who have and have not been vaccinated against coronavirus.
Given the rapid spread of the variant and the increase in home testing, with insurance companies now having to cover eight tests per month, some have begun to question the value of the Biden administration’s investments in the contact tracing and if the practice is still helpful.
While Becker’s Hospital Review writes that it’s “unclear the exact amount of funds” that went into tracing and the US Treasury said Newsweek it “isn’t something Treasury tracks”, the number is somewhere in the hundreds of millions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doled out $631 million for tracing efforts in April 2020 and some states have spent millions developing apps.
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Dr. Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, explained how useful these investments are now amid Omicron’s ramp-up and how useful they could be in the future.
“When you have a huge outbreak like the one we have right now… It has less relevance,” Benjamin said. Newsweek. “(But) contact tracing still plays a huge role in our response.”
While Omicron’s ability to spread quickly makes the original contact tracing measures less useful, Benjamin said those investments aren’t wasted. Once the current variant is gone, he said existing contact tracing infrastructure can again be deployed to deal with geographically confined outbreaks to prevent larger spreads.
Now that contact tracing technology and public health networks are in place, these tools can be used to prevent the spread of other diseases in the meantime, allowing measurements to still be useful, Benjamin said. Overreacting to the current contagiousness of contact tracing with respect to COIVD-19 could be incredibly costly and once again set America behind when it comes to responding to future disease threats.
“One of the failures of our national policy and strategy has been this yo-yo funding where we put money into when something bad happens,” Benjamin said. “The money comes in, often a little later than we needed it, then the money goes, and the capacity goes. Then something bad happens again, and we could have mitigated it, but we didn’t have the infrastructure to do that. If you built an army that way, your army would never succeed.
Benjamin points to this lack of existing contact tracing infrastructure as why US contact tracing efforts have never achieved the level of success seen in places like Western Europe. He said many communities did not receive funding until it was too late, which never allowed programs to take off.
In the meantime, Benjamin said contact tracing in its current form should be changed to reflect the new realities of the virus.
Benjamin said people should now identify themselves if they have potentially been infected. Once they have received an answer to this suspicion through a home test, he says they should contact their doctor who can provide therapies, the state or local health service and the people they are with. came into contact.
“The concept of contact tracing changes a bit from the health department being the center of the contact tracing effort to people being helped with that,” Benjamin said. Newsweek. “So contact tracing still plays an important role.”
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