Put jobless back to work tracking coronavirus
By Tracy Walsh / Bloomberg Opinion
Nearly 17 million Americans have lost their jobs since mid-March, when the coronavirus started spreading around the country. Many won’t be able to return to work until the outbreak is contained. Meanwhile, there’s a proven strategy for containing infectious diseases, which is notoriously difficult to carry out because it’s so labor-intensive.
Why don’t we solve both problems at once?
With “contact tracing,” a mainstay of infectious disease control, health workers identify people who have been infected, contact them, learn who they may have exposed, and reach out to those people to limit the spread. Right now, the coronavirus is too widespread and testing too limited for such a targeted approach to work. But once case numbers become more manageable, the U.S. will move away from what epidemiologists call the “population-based” approach, which requires everybody to self-isolate, and toward one focused on containing individual cases. This will be the only way most of us can get back to normal life without risking devastating new outbreaks.
It’s a strategy that’s been shown to work against Covid-19 in New Zealand and Iceland. In the U.S., health officials use it to contain mumps and other diseases. But in the current crisis, the U.S. doesn’t have enough public-health workers to do the job. Contact tracing helped snuff out Liberia’s Ebola outbreak in 2014, but it took 4,000 workers to protect the country’s 5 million citizens. Wuhan, a city of 11 million, reportedly needed 9,000 contact tracers to suppress Covid-19. Estimates vary, but the U.S. will need 100,000 to 300,000 contact tracers to contain the coronavirus. That’s a lot of manpower.
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