As countries restart, WHO warns about lack of COVID-19 testing
NEW YORK — A top world health official Monday warned that countries are essentially driving blind in reopening their economies without setting up strong contact tracing to beat back flare-ups of the coronavirus.
The warning came as France and Belgium emerged from lockdowns, the Netherlands sent children back to school, and many U.S. states pressed ahead with the lifting of business restrictions.
Authorities have cautioned that the scourge could come back with a vengeance without widespread testing and tracing of infected people’s contacts with others.
In fact, fears of infection spikes in countries that have loosened up were borne out in recent days in Germany, where new clusters were linked to three slaughterhouses; Wuhan, the Chinese city where the crisis started; and South Korea, where a single nightclub customer was linked to 85 new cases.
The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that robust contact tracing measures adopted by Germany and South Korea provide hope that those countries can detect and stop virus clusters before they get out of control. But he said the same is not true of other nations exiting their lockdowns, declining to name specific countries.
“Shutting your eyes and trying to drive through this blind is about as silly an equation as I’ve seen,” Ryan said. “And I’m really concerned that certain countries are setting themselves up for some seriously blind driving over the next few months.”
Worldwide, the virus has infected a confirmed 4.1 million people and killed more than 280,000, including over 150,000 in Europe and about 80,000 in the U.S., according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Experts believe those numbers understate the true toll of the outbreak.
More than 10,000 people are involved in contact tracing in Germany, a country of 83 million, or about one-quarter the size of the U.S. Other nations are behind.
Britain, for example, abandoned an initial contact-tracing effort in March when the virus’s rapid spread made it impossible. Now it is recruiting 18,000 people to do the legwork.
France’s health minister has for weeks promised robust contact tracing and pledged the country would test 700,000 people per week. On Monday, with progress on those efforts unclear, the nation’s highest court ordered the government to take extreme care in protecting the right to privacy, casting doubt on how to proceed.
In the U.S., where health officials will be watching closely in the coming days for any resurgence of the virus two weeks after states began gradually reopening, contact tracing is a patchwork of readiness levels. States are scrambling to hire and train contact tracers, with experts saying the U.S. will need to bring on hundreds of thousands of them.
Apple, Google and a number of U.S. states, as well as European countries, are working to develop contact-tracing apps that can show whether someone has crossed paths with an infected person.