What’s needed to reopen US? Contact tracing and more COVID-19 tests, CDC chief says

Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday that reopening the U.S. after the coronavirus pandemic will be a “gradual process,” media outlets reported.

Redfield told NBC’s “Today” that testing more people, including those who are immune to the virus, and contact tracing will be required in order to reopen the country. Redfield said the process would happen “county by county by county,” because the “pandemic has affected different parts of the country differently,”

“There’s no doubt that we have to reopen correctly,” Redfield told NBC. The reopening would be “a step-by-step gradual process, that’s got to be data-driven,” he said.

Contact tracing is identifying and reaching out to people who have tested positive for COVID-19 and having them quarantined and monitored to stop the spread of the virus, NPR reported. That process is then repeated with that person’s contacts.

The process will involve increasing COVID-19 testing and then testing every infected person’s contacts, NPR reported.

“It is going to be critical,” Redfield told NPR. “We can’t afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission — so it is going to be very aggressive.“

Non-profit Partners in Health will train workers in Massachusetts to interview people for contact tracing, STAT News reported. Contact tracing helped contain the SARS outbreak, according to the outlet.

“We never thought we would be doing this kind of work here,” Seung, senior health and policy adviser for tuberculosis at Partners In Health, told STAT. Normally the group provides assistance in other countries. “We never thought we would be in a once-in-100-year pandemic, either.”

Apple and Google are also building smartphone software that lets people know if they’ve been in contact with someone with coronavirus, The New York Times reported.

This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 12:34 PM with the headline "What’s needed to reopen US? Contact tracing and more COVID-19 tests, CDC chief says."