Large team recruited for Covid-19
The Southern District Health Board have recruited and trained a team of more than 80 people to tract down cases related to coronavirus in the southern region.
Southern DHB Covid-19 contact tracer lead Kate Marshall has trained more than 80 people for the job since early February.
Southern District Health Board Covid-19 contact case manager Mandy Murphy said the DHB had and sent out and an SOS to recruit staff to work on the outbreak.
Along with staff recruited from other parts of the Southern DHB, they had volunteers from the Southland District Council and Invercargill City Council which it typically wouldn’t do for an outbreak like measles, Murphy said.
The team had very busy and Murphy had worked 14 days straight before having a break.
Murphy investigates confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Southland and Queenstown and tracking down the people they had been in contact with eg where they worked, travelled or sports they might have been involved with.
The team of contact tracers then determine the risk of those contacts from high to low.
Murphy had worked on other outbreaks such as measles and mumps but the scale the of the cases and the speed of coronavirus was unprecedented, she said.
‘‘The amount of resources that had been thrown into tackling the outbreak had been quite staggering.’’
While Murphy did not know if the number of cases would reduce as the country went into isolation she hoped that it would and the contact tracing team was well prepared.