The Mecklenburg County Health Department has reduced its contact tracing for COVID-19.
Now, if residents test positive for COVID-19 in the county, they likely won’t get a call from one of the county’s contact tracers. Instead, they’ll get a text message with instructions on how to do their own contact tracing.
“Community-level contact tracing, where we were trying to trace every case and follow up all their contacts, at this stage, is not the strategy we are focusing on and we are not putting a lot of resources behind it,” Dr Raynard Washington, Mecklenburg County Health Director, said in a recent interview with WFAE.
Washington said county contact tracers are targeting their efforts to track and manage potential outbreaks in places like nursing homes and long-term care facilities as well as the county jail, schools and shelters for homeless, as there is a higher risk of rapid spread among these populations.
People who test positive or have COVID-like symptoms should call people they were in close contact with and shouldn’t be embarrassed, Washington said. About 1 in 3 people tested for the virus in Mecklenburg County are positive, according to the county’s latest numbers as of Wednesday.
“There is nothing to be ashamed of having COVID. It’s a respiratory disease and we never know when any of us will have it,” Washington said. “But it’s important for everyone’s health that we just tell people.”
He added that he thinks community-level contact tracing at the county health department will eventually be “largely phased out” as the coronavirus becomes endemic or routinely circulates in the community with transmission rates, d lower hospitalization and death as well as a lower impact. on public life.
As of July 2020, Mecklenburg County employed 25 full-time contact tracers and another 100 people worked part-time to help prevent further spread of the coronavirus. These workers were bothered by people not providing phone numbers or addresses to their close contacts, although Mecklenburg County said WFAE at the time that he did not have information on the success rate of contact tracing.
Meanwhile, then head of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Mandy Cohen, said in July 2020 that state contact tracers only reached between a third and half of the people they called.
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