New York contact tracing is rated ‘very bad’

City is failing to get details of close contacts from almost two thirds of people who test positive for virus

NEW York city’s coronavirus contact tracing programme has been described as “very bad”, after initial results showed that only 35 per cent of people testing positive provided information about close contacts to tracers.

Since June 1, 3,000 tracers have been working in the city to identify all those who been in contact with someone who tested positive.

New York has had more than 200,000 cases, with 17,500 confirmed deaths and 4,700 probable deaths, but tracing has been poor.

“For each person, you should be in touch with 75 per cent of their contacts within a day,” said Perry Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, which is guiding an effort to recruit tracers in New Jersey. He called New York’s rate for eliciting contacts “very bad” and said it may be due to the inexperience of the tracers, and insufficient hands-on training.

Many people who tested positive failed to provide information over the phone, or left interviews before being asked. Others told tracers they had been only at home and had not put others at risk, but did not name family members.

Unlike in countries such as Singapore, China, Germany and South Korea, resistance to using contact tracing apps is high in the US. Only Utah, South Dakota and North Dakota are trialling voluntary contact tracing apps.

Alabama, South Carolina, and North Dakota are the only states to have committed to using a new system designed by Apple and Google. The system is not an app, but software health authorities can build their own apps on top of it.

New York city’s effort relies instead on call centres and questionnaires.

Bill de Blasio, the mayor, announced in early May that he was putting the public hospital system, in charge of the contact tracing programme. The city’s health department has a 150-year history of fighting epidemics such as tuberculosis, HIV and Ebola, but Mr de Blasio insisted the hospitals section was better equipped. The decision was widely criticised by local officials, and contributed to uncertainty about his test and trace team.

New York state’s system, under governor Andrew Cuomo, is operating separately, but coordinated with the city’s programme. It will also be conducted mainly through phone calls to people who test positive, and to people with whom they are in close contact.

Dr Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former commissioner of the New York city health department, said: “There are enormous challenges in New York city, ranging from the extent of the outbreak here, which is still very large, to the mobility of population in metro areas.”

Dr Frieden, who is now president and chief executive of Resolve to Save Lives, which is working on the state’s wider contact tracing effort, said that other challenges include population density, reliance on public transport, and the amount of travel into the city.

Today, the city will enter the second phase of reopening, with restaurants resuming service outdoors and more people returning to offices.

Only six people died of the virus on Friday, the last date for which data is available. At the peak of the pandemic, the city had 800 deaths a day.