Global Statistics

All countries
695,781,740
Confirmed
Updated on September 26, 2023 9:04 pm
All countries
627,110,498
Recovered
Updated on September 26, 2023 9:04 pm
All countries
6,919,573
Deaths
Updated on September 26, 2023 9:04 pm

Global Statistics

All countries
695,781,740
Confirmed
Updated on September 26, 2023 9:04 pm
All countries
627,110,498
Recovered
Updated on September 26, 2023 9:04 pm
All countries
6,919,573
Deaths
Updated on September 26, 2023 9:04 pm

Why coronavirus contact tracing is failing

City of Cape Town urges people to leave Kataza the baboon alone

Kataza the baboon. Facebook / Baboon Matters The City of Cape Town has asked the public not to feed a baboon that has relocated to Tokai. The baboon, known as Kataza or SK11, is slowly being integrated into the Tokai troop. Video footage, however, shows humans feeding Kataza. The City of Cape Town has requested that Kataza…

Rassie: There are various benefits for SA rugby to go north

As SA Rugby moves to determine which franchises will go to Europe in future, Rassie Erasmus has noted several potential benefits for the local game should that route be followed.The national director of rugby believes the high world rankings of Wales, Ireland and Scotland mean PRO Rugby is competitive and that fans will eventually identify…

A Once-in-a-Century Climate ‘Anomaly’ Might Have Made World War I Even Deadlier

(John Finney Photography/Moment/Getty Images) An abnormally bad season of weather may have had a significant impact on the death toll from both World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to new research, with many more lives being lost due to torrential rain and plummeting temperatures. Through a detailed analysis of an ice…

PICS | Truck driver killed in Pinetown after truck ploughs into several cars

A vehicle that was hit in the accident. A truck driver was killed in a horrific sequence of events following an initial crash in Pinetown. While trying to move the truck after the accident, it appeared to lose control. He died after falling out of the truck which ploughed into several cars and a wall.A truck driver…

42 people in court for R56m police vehicle branding scam

Forty-two people have been implicated in a police car branding scam. Forty-two people have been arrested for their alleged involvement in a police vehicle branding scam. They face a range of charges including corruption, fraud, money laundering, theft and perjury.Of these, 22 are serving police members.Forty-two people are set to appear in the Pretoria Magistrate's Court on…

Government virus expert Anthony Fauci told reporters in a press briefing on Friday that contact tracing efforts to contain the coronavirus are “not working.”

Why it matters: Without a vaccine, contact tracing of cases is the best tool available to stem the spread of an outbreak. But understaffed public health agencies, privacy concerns, disappointing technology, and the sheer size of the pandemic are limiting the technique’s effectiveness.

By the numbers: The public health standard is that a state should have at least 30 contract tracers — public health employees dedicated to investigating the contacts of positive cases — for every 100,000 people during a pandemic. According to a June 25 report by Nephron Research, however, just seven states have met that standard.

  • Another seven have near-term plans to sufficiently increase contact tracing capacity.
  • Many of the states experiencing the biggest surges in cases are well below the recommended number of tracers and have no near-term plans to reach that level. That includes states like Texas, where hospital executives in Houston were warning that ICU use from COVID-19 could soon exceed capacity, and Arizona, where hospitalization numbers are surging.
  • CDC Director Robert Redfield testified that there are 27,000 to 28,000 people doing contact tracing work. That’s up from 11,000 at the start of the pandemic, but it is well below the minimum 99,000 tracers that the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials estimated are necessary for the U.S. to safely reopen.
  • Other public health experts believe the true need is closer to 300,000 tracers.

Even those states that have sufficiently beefed up their contact tracing systems are struggling to get people who have tested positive to report whom they were in contact with — or, in some cases, to even pick up the phone.

  • New York state currently has nearly 50 tracers per 100,000 people, the most in the U.S. But in New York City, long the epicenter of the pandemic, contact tracers were only able to successfully complete an interview with about half of all positive cases between June 1 and June 20.
  • That’s well below the 75% rate public health experts say is needed to keep an outbreak contained.
  • The situation is worse in other hard-hit cities like San Antonio, which has only received responses from about 300 of the 2,500 cases currently under review.

Context: The U.S. has had great success in the past controlling diseases like HIV and tuberculosis through contact tracing. But COVID-19 would present enormous challenges to even a well-funded and well-staffed national contact tracing effort — which the U.S. assuredly does not have.

  • Unlike tracing the spread of STDs, where contacts can be narrowed down to sexual partners, COVID-19 requires tracers to quiz a positive case for everyone they may have come into contact with, even for a relatively short period of time.

Early hopes that app-based smartphone contact tracing might help have largely gone unfulfilled.

  • At least 60% of the population would need to download such apps for them to be effective, but according to a recent study, just 29% of Americans would consider downloading one.
  • Privacy concerns are a major obstacle to successful contact tracing. South Korea’s success in controlling outbreaks was partly due to its use of phone GPS records, credit-card transactions and even security camera footage to augment its contact tracing — methods that would likely not fly in the U.S.
  • Black Americans are being infected and dying of COVID-19 at higher rates, but a long history of discrimination — including by doctors — has made them “less willing to line up and trust a public agency right now, public health included,” writes Katelyn Esmonde, a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

The bottom line: More than four months after the first recorded U.S. COVID-19 cases, the virus is still outpacing our ability and willingness to track it.

Read More

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Hot Topics

City of Cape Town urges people to leave Kataza the baboon alone

Kataza the baboon. Facebook / Baboon Matters The City of Cape Town has asked the public not to feed a baboon that has relocated to Tokai. The baboon, known as Kataza or SK11, is slowly being integrated into the Tokai troop. Video footage, however, shows humans feeding Kataza. The City of Cape Town has requested that Kataza…

Rassie: There are various benefits for SA rugby to go north

As SA Rugby moves to determine which franchises will go to Europe in future, Rassie Erasmus has noted several potential benefits for the local game should that route be followed.The national director of rugby believes the high world rankings of Wales, Ireland and Scotland mean PRO Rugby is competitive and that fans will eventually identify…

A Once-in-a-Century Climate ‘Anomaly’ Might Have Made World War I Even Deadlier

(John Finney Photography/Moment/Getty Images) An abnormally bad season of weather may have had a significant impact on the death toll from both World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to new research, with many more lives being lost due to torrential rain and plummeting temperatures. Through a detailed analysis of an ice…

Related Articles

City of Cape Town urges people to leave Kataza the baboon alone

Kataza the baboon. Facebook / Baboon Matters The City of Cape Town has asked the public not to feed a baboon that has relocated to Tokai. The baboon, known as Kataza or SK11, is slowly being integrated into the Tokai troop. Video footage, however, shows humans feeding Kataza. The City of Cape Town has requested that Kataza…

Rassie: There are various benefits for SA rugby to go north

As SA Rugby moves to determine which franchises will go to Europe in future, Rassie Erasmus has noted several potential benefits for the local game should that route be followed.The national director of rugby believes the high world rankings of Wales, Ireland and Scotland mean PRO Rugby is competitive and that fans will eventually identify…

A Once-in-a-Century Climate ‘Anomaly’ Might Have Made World War I Even Deadlier

(John Finney Photography/Moment/Getty Images) An abnormally bad season of weather may have had a significant impact on the death toll from both World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to new research, with many more lives being lost due to torrential rain and plummeting temperatures. Through a detailed analysis of an ice…