The race to track Covid-19
Thirty-three new cases of coronavirus came to the Waikato Public Health Unit on its busiest day of the outbreak.
By the end of the week, there were 96 new cases in total – and hundreds of people who may have spent time with them while they were infectious.
Numbers like that made it a frantic time for medical officer of health Dr Richard Hoskins and colleagues.
‘‘It was actually pretty well organised but, boy, it was busy,’’ medical officer of health Dr Richard Hoskins said.
One set of test results came through at half-past midnight as the ‘‘amazing’’ Waikato lab worked extra to catch up. The public health team had to upsize, fast.
‘‘Over the course of less than a week, we pretty much quadrupled our nursing capacity by drafting in additional public health nurses. We diverted all our health improvement advisers to doing daily symptom checking. And we actively recruited and expanded our doctor and specifically our medical officer of health capacity.’’
Contact tracing has been under the spotlight both as a key part of stamping out the virus and because a review found the system overloaded with fewer than 100 daily cases.
If you test positive with coronavirus, someone like Hoskins rings, breaks the news, and quizzes you about your past fortnight.
He wants to find out when you got the virus, how, and who else might have caught it.
Full phone interviews have given way to a digital survey, so people could consult travel tickets, work schedules, phones, calendars. Then there are follow-up questions.
A person’s close contacts are next on the list for a call.
Public health units deal with people living with the confirmed case, the others go to a National Close Contact Tracing service.
Speed is crucial, Hoskins said, so getting tested early helps.
There may be just two or three days between the first person getting sick and their contacts being sick.
For contacts, it’s not as simple as telling you Bob has coronavirus and asking if you were near him at his recent 50th birthday party. They’ll protect privacy by saying someone at the party was infectious, Hoskins said.
Whether you’re a close contact needing quarantine, or casual contact – watching for symptoms – soon becomes clear.
‘‘They say ‘look, I just dropped my niece off at Bob’s party. I went in and said hi to Joe, whose house it was’ – and we know Joe wasn’t the case – ‘I was in and out within two minutes and didn’t kiss anybody’ ... You are a casual contact.
‘‘Whereas if they were there the whole time and can’t remember who they danced with or didn’t dance with, we’re going to go, that’s four hours indoors, in the same room as somebody with Covid. That’s a close contact.’’
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Waikato contacted almost every confirmed case within 24 hours, most within four hours, Hoskins said.
Step two – contacting contacts – starts once the team has learned from the confirmed case who they are.
An early look at data shows Waikato didn’t get to all contacts in a day the first week, Hoskins said, but did so for more than 80 per cent of people after that.