SC plans to hire hundreds more contact tracers to bolster coronavirus response
While South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster announced plans Wednesday to increase state testing for COVID-19 in the coming months, health officials have decided to ramp up the state’s contact tracing program by hiring almost 800 people to help combat the novel virus.
The job? Tracking down people who came in contact with others who tested positive for the coronavirus with the hope of preventing further spread of the virus.
Dr. Joan Duwve, director of public health with the Department of Health and Environmental Control, said the state plans to dramatically increase its contact tracers in the coming months to roughly 1,000 people. In March, when SC first began seeing cases pop up in the state, DHEC had just 20 employees in the contact tracing division, a spokesperson told The State last week.
“We want to have a rapid response, knowing that people quickly become infectious with this illness,” Duwve said. “We can’t wait five days or seven days to start doing that contact tracing. So we’re going to need an army of contact tracers to help us respond in short time to somebody who has a positive diagnosis.”
Duwve said Wednesday that DHEC now has 230 people working as contact tracers, thanks to a combination of new hires and transferring existing employees. But with the state planning to administer 220,000 new tests by the end of June — more than three times the current number — a wave in confirmed new cases is expected. When that happens, Duwve said the department needs to have the manpower to keep up.
The additional 770 contact tracers won’t be hired right away since the current number of cases doesn’t require it, she added. But DHEC plasn to begin training people now so workers will be in the agency’s “back pocket” when the time comes.
“We will identify individuals who are interested in assisting us,” Duwve said. “We have volunteer calls coming in from all around the state, (saying) ‘How can we help you? There is an online training module that we will post on our website for people who are interested, and they can take that training and learn how to do contact tracing and we will maintain a database of those individuals.”
Contact tracers play a key role in limiting the spread of the pandemic by interviewing people who have tested positive, determining whom the infected people have been in contact with and warning those contacts that they may also have been infected and importance of self-isolation. By doing so, they help prevent people from unknowingly passing along the virus to others.
The role also involves being supportive of those diagnosed with the coronavirus and explaining what the diagnosis means, Duwve said. Contact tracers will be asked to link people with needed services, such as food banks or primary care providers to ensure an infected person’s situation doesn’t get worse.
“They will develop a relationship with the person,” Duwve said. “They will explain the person needs to be in isolation for 14 days, and they will explain why.
“They will ask about family members, who have you been in contact with, because we want to keep the people around you safe as well. And then they will reach out to those individuals, they will talk to them about the importance of quarantining for a period of time, for 14 days, to see if they were to develop symptoms or not, and they would expand testing outreach to those individuals as well.”
