All the county health departments are ramping up their contact tracing capabilities. This week I’ll focus on what Maricopa County has been doing. They have a 2 pronged approach- staffing up internally and contracting with AZ 211 for extra help. Here’s a previous blog post on the what contact tracing entails.
Maricopa has 52 new people who now work in their Epidemiology program to support the contact tracing investigations teams. There are an additional 27 folks in the hiring process. Every week, new investigators begin training and become independent. Once training is complete, all investigators go full force into interviewing cases, which includes identifying every close contact while they were infectious. The detailed contact tracing is handled by Maricopa County staff while following up with close contacts is handled by the team at AZ 211, who are hiring an additional 50 tracers.
The folks who work for AZ 211 don’t require as much training because they don’t perform an extensive investigation requiring medical knowledge nor do they have confidential information related to cases. They provide the contacts with standardized information about what symptoms to watch for, what to do if they get symptoms and how to avoid spreading disease to others. They also answer any questions the contact has and determine if additional services are needed.
Maricopa is also implementing a plan to load case and contact information into a secure automated system which will monitor contacts for symptoms and alert staff. That system (when it comes on-line) will also inform cases when they no longer require isolation.
When the automated system is implemented it’ll take a big workload off both the investigators and contact tracers, who can then focus on enhanced tracing.
Once the remaining new 27 in-house, Maricopa county employees are trained, they’ll have 76 new investigator team members interviewing cases and contacts 7 days per week. At this staffing level, they’ll be able to interview roughly 500 cases per day with the goal of completing the interview within 24 hours of receipt.
Editorial Note: Effective contact tracing requires robust testing in the community as well as fast turn around times from the laboratories. If the labs fall behind (as I have anecdotally heard) case data gets to the investigators after the horse has already left the barn and the case investigations and contact tracing efforts are a lot less effective. Lab turn-around time matters!
