Health officials are working to contact everyone who may have come in contact with a person infected with the coronavirus. It’s called ‘contact tracing’.
“We find someone who is infected, they present to their doctor and get diagnosed, that gets reported to the health agency and then we will follow-up with that individual in regards to who they had contact with,” said Susan Hassig, Associate Professor in the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
She says contact tracing allows health officials to better target potential hot spots of the virus and avoid requiring everyone in the country to get tested.
“And so through that process of following the chains of contact and transmission, that is how we can then be much more targeted in terms of isolation and quarantine kinds-of-things which will stop viruses like this from spreading further,” said Hassig.
Hassig says people who are the virus was traced back to and were contacted by a health official, will have their privacy protected, “They’ll just say, ‘it has come to our attention that you may have been exposed to someone who tested positive for coronavirus’. That being the case we would like to know how are you feeling now.”
She says health officials and the CDC have a new focus on tracing the virus so they can be more selective in where testing needs to be done and contact tracing is how health officials can detect those virus hot spots.
