The Value of Learning About Contact Tracing

I have now been unemployed for a month and a half and have not made a great deal of progress in my job search despite my best efforts. A global pandemic has a way of drying up the job market.

But there is demand for at least one position - contract tracer. Late last week, a Facebook friend suggested I look into the free online course that was launched by Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health called "COVID-19 Contact Tracing" which is taught by infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Emily Gurley. The course is divided into five modules and a final examination and takes about five and a half hours of your time.

With time in abundance, I took my Facebook friend up on the suggestion and earlier today I completed the course with a grade of 95.66% (the minimum grade is 85%). No sooner that I had completed the course I immediately began applying for contact tracer positions.

Now at this point you might be asking - what the hell is contact tracing?

Simply put it is a public health strategy aimed at mitigating the spread of an infectious disease. It has been used for everything between the measles and Ebola and now for COVID-19. A contact tracer gets in touch with an individual who has tested positive for COVID-19 and makes a plan for them to isolate for the duration of their symptoms to avoid spreading it to others.

Additionally, in the course of communicating with a COVID-19 patient a contact tracer determines who he or she have had contact with during their infectious period. When that information is determined the contact tracer gets in touch with the COVID-19 patient's contacts and works with them to make a plan to quarantine for 14 days so as stop any further spread of COVID-19.

An example of contact tracing at work during the COVID-19 pandemic is finding the 180 people who were exposed to an individual who tested positive for COVID-19 the day after attending a Mother's Day church service in California's Butte County just north of Sacramento. Most contact tracing would likely be considerably smaller than that but no less challenging if people are reluctant to answer the phone, if there are language barriers or if they are undocumented.

As usual I harbor no illusions. There are no guarantees a job as a contact tracer will be in my future. Here in New York, specialized health training or professional healthcare experience is a prerequisite but that is not the case for states like Massachusetts or Missouri. From what I have seen so far there seems to be a lot of demand for contact tracers in Kentucky. So I applied for a position there. Whether that would involve moving down there or working remotely isn't clear. But then again what is these days? As always we shall see.

Undoubtedly the demand for contact tracers will exceed the supply. In the event that I am not in demand there is the value of learning about contact tracing and its importance as a public health tool. In a time where a high value is placed on ignorance and misinformation the gaining of knowledge and gathering of facts becomes that much more important. If nothing else there is something I know today that I did not know yesterday. All I can hope is to be able to use this knowledge tomorrow.