San Francisco is looking for some good detectives. The city is expanding its contact tracing program to minimize the spread of coronavirus after a team re-traced the footsteps of two virus patients, leading to the discovery of an outbreak in a homeless shelter.
Now, San Francisco Mayor London Breed wants to expand those efforts using an app that helps teams follow the breadcrumbs backwards from an infected patient.
“Find out exactly who that patient has been in contact with. but we can also check on them, check on their symptoms,” said Mayor Breed. “And with increasing our testing capacity - because they go hand in hand - we can have people tested that may have been in contact with someone who has been infected.”
Anyone who has come into contact with someone known to be infected will be put into quarantine and tested, and teams will be able to monitor possible symptoms.
But expanding contact tracing is going to require a large more staff. The Mayor says some city staffers are being redirected onto contact tracing teams. “Students at UCSF, some of our disaster service workers with San Francisco, some of our librarians and other city workers will be trained to do this work.”
Right now there are 50 of these trackers and the city hopes to have five times that many in just two weeks. Information is confidential and it won't include immigration status.