Contact tracing is a mess – people with Covid should inform associates themselves

CONTACT tracing is a mess, and the powers that be have known about it for months. Individual calls are taking three and four times as long as they should, because the traced are arguing the severity of contact with the HSE trackers.

And it’s all down to patient privacy and GDPR. The EU’s data protection regulation, coupled with medical confidentiality, prevents the HSE from identifying the person who has developed Covid when they call close contacts.

This leads to those being called demanding to know who ‘Patient X’ is, and launching into rationales about why they need to know the name – so they can form their own judgment about how extensive their contact with that person was.

The callers then reply they can’t discuss or disclose the name but would like you to make an appointment with a GP for a test, and did we mention that you should already be self-isolating?

Few, however, want to immediately shut down their lives on the basis of an anonymous say-so, so the argument – and bargaining – rages over the phone. It’s resulting in people declining to co-operate with the recommendation – yet the associate is still marked as having been traced, even if zero benefit to that person or society comes from it.

With 400 people at work on tracing, and even 1,000 people testing positive on a given day, and these having five close contacts apiece, the numbers come to 5,000 divided by 400, or just over 12 calls to be made daily. Even if it were twice that number, or even four times that number, it should be manageable in an eight-hour day, should it not?

But no. Calls are long, and their argumentative or even intemperate nature may be feeding into people not wanting to work in tracing.

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said last Thursday: “We are now trying to contact-trace 1,000 people’s contacts nearly every day.” It is “really tough” on the people manning the phones, he said. “If we’re going to have a couple of hundred or 1,000 positives a day, and everyone has six or seven contacts, that’s 7,000 people a day we need contact-traced. You need an army of people — probably an army bigger than our actual army — to trace that many people every day.”

“When there were issues previously, the former minister brought in the army,” said Labour leader Alan Kelly. There was an opportunity to address staffing in the summer, but it had apparently been missed, he said. “I think the effectiveness of the tracing system is in serious doubt.

“The Taoiseach keeps referring to the turnaround time for tracing as being 2.2 days, but that is not the case in the community where it takes 4.1 days,” Mr Kelly said.

With the delays and an ever-growing workload, the HSE was forced to throw in the towel last weekend, advising the infected to themselves take on the task of informing others. Instead of a behemoth like the HSE taking on the task of tracing someone’s contacts, that person themselves, if not extraordinarily sick, is best placed to identify and inform his or her associates (and to bypass non-disclosure bureaucracy by announcing the diagnosis themselves).

Of course it may involve admitting they are sick, which is personal information but there is surely no shame in ‘admitting’ to being hit by a virus that can strike anyone worldwide. A belt-and-braces approach, including encouraging the individual to reach out, is surely best.

The HSE is not best fit to take on the task alone, not with confidentiality tying one hand behind its back.

‘We are now trying to contact-trace 1,000 people’s contacts nearly every day’