Peter Hamlin / AP
Thursday, July 16, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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As the nation struggles with the resurgence of COVID-19, robust contact tracing could help alleviate much of the strain on our already-burdened health care systems. However, we have a massive shortfall in the number of available contact tracers.
Contact tracing — identifying people who have been exposed to people with COVID-19 and asking them to self-isolate — has shown its effectiveness, helping to eradicate the disease from New Zealand and other places.
In the Mountain West region, we can no longer afford to fight the pandemic with one hand tied behind our backs. In Nevada’s special legislative session, lawmakers should consider exploring new avenues of contact tracing, especially allowing youth volunteers to supplement our contact tracing phone banks. Thankfully, the Interim Finance Committee recently authorized the expenditure of $96 million of federal funds “for contact tracing and expanded laboratory testing.”
Nevada should consider the approach of one of the few states to successfully control their COVID-19 infections: New York. State government leaders there, unlike most of their counterparts in other states, launched a plan to hire sufficient contact tracers for their population, thanks to a new innovation: an online course on COVID-19 contact tracing developed by Johns Hopkins University. The New York Department of Health uses this course as a training tool to create a new army of state employees combating the virus remotely.
Here in Nevada, we face a state budget that is stretched thin as we try to handle the financial fallout from the three-month closure of our primary economic engine — our gaming and hospitality industry. The state’s rainy day fund has been spent mopping up the water, providing a stopgap to the budget devastation, but it’s still pouring outside, with the special session meeting to discuss a $1 billion-plus budget shortfall. Hiring an army of state employees to contact trace would only add fiscal pressure to a budget about to be cut to the bone, but all the more reason to draw from New York’s example.
By establishing a volunteer body of citizens to contact trace after completing an online training such as Johns Hopkins’ course, Nevada could launch a much more effective and robust pandemic response. This addition to Nevada’s Department of Health and Human Services would allow an approach that could reduce our growing number of COVID-19 cases and allow our struggling economy to revive.
Public health workers currently performing the grunt work of contact tracing — manning the phone lines and conducting interviews — could instead focus on coordinating the state’s response to the wave of cases that experts tell us is coming, and ensure that hospitals get the resources they need to keep our health professionals safe.
A volunteer corps would also harness young people’s enthusiasm. Across the nation, thousands of youths have, in fact, volunteered to be exposed to the virus in order to aid vaccine research. Opening a contact tracing program to those 21 and older offers a way for students and professionals currently working from home to help without putting their health at risk. I know my fellow Nevada students will help their communities fight this virus and bring our state back to a new normal.
This is a new approach to public health, but volunteer programs have become increasingly popular as the COVID-19 pandemic has grown. For instance, Santa Clara County began a volunteer contact tracing program, and thanks in part to this innovation, Santa Clara’s COVID-19 infection rate is nearly a third of California’s infection rate, and is significantly lower than most neighboring counties. In addition, the University of Texas at Austin’s health system is beginning a similar program.
This program doesn’t have to limit itself to COVID-19. We now live in a world where diseases and pandemics, long considered bogeymen of the past, are once again real threats. In the post-COVID world, there will be another pandemic. It may not happen in the next month, the next year or even the next decade, but disease won’t disappear, just because the world is more industrialized than it was 300 years ago. In the past, the citizen-soldiers of the National Guard protected us from harm. In this new era of social distancing and personal protective equipment, we will need a new army of citizen contact tracers to protect us. It’s time to prepare for the next disease.
Let’s get to it.
Eshaan Vakil is a student researcher on public policy issues at the Brookings Mountain West center at UNLV. He specializes in the intersection of government and technology/science. He can be reached at [email protected].
