In only a week, New York has seen thousands of people apply to be “contact tracers” who will work to try to slow the spread of COVID-19.

The application process opened May 1 and by Friday had close to 7,000 applicants, said state Department of Health spokeswoman Erin Silk.

“We are working as quickly as possible to stand up the statewide contact training initiative, and expect to finalize a launch date soon,” Silk said in an email Friday. “We are evaluating various technology applications that could assist in the initiative, but the key to effective contact tracing is direct outreach by individuals to work with a positive case to successfully identify their contacts.”

The state is now hiring tracers and supervisors. The premise of contact tracing is simple: Identify people infected with COVID-19, track the contacts they may have had in recent weeks, then reach out to those people for possible testing. By doing this, the disease is slowed.

But, while the premise may sound simple, execution can often be problematic. 

“Tracing is not hard on an individual basis,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said when recently announcing the program. “The problem is the massive scale and with an operation that has never existed before.”

The sheer scope of contact tracing in a state that has become the country’s epicenter of COVID-19 is massive. State officials predict they need from 6,400 to 17,000 people employed as tracers.

Under the plan, the tracing will collaborate with Connecticut and New Jersey. Assisting with funding, hiring and training is Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“One of the most important steps to take to reopen the economy as safely as possible is to create a system of contact tracing,” said former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman who founded Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“When social distancing is relaxed, contact tracing is our best hope for isolating the virus when it appears — and keeping it isolated,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

The contact tracing process is often implemented once the number of new COVID-19 cases is leveling off or decreasing — the so-called “flattening of the curve.” With this, the number of new cases is not continuing to climb, and the task of finding people who have had interaction with infected individuals is not quite as monumental a job.

Contact tracing has proven to be one route to improve COVID-19 containment and reopening of businesses in several countries, including Germany and South Korea.  There, citizens don’t have privacy protections as significant as those in the United States.

However, people involved in the program preparation and training in other states say that the questions of possible contacts and the sharing of information includes privacy protections.

To apply for a job in the tracing program

Go to https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/get-involved-how-you-can-help 

Contact Gary Craig at [email protected] or at 585-258-2479. Follow him on Twitter at gcraig1. This coverage is only possible with support from readers. Sign up today for a digital subscription.

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