Course to train contact tracer army
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on Monday unveiled a course on the online platform Coursera to teach Americans the fundamentals of contact tracing.
“The motivation for doing the course is to be able to provide a good, solid, basic training for the workforce that needs to scale up very rapidly,” said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a physician at the Johns Hopkins public health school and director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative. Privacy, medical ethics, virology and interview techniques are included in the five- to six-hour package. The course is available free of charge to the public.
Contact tracers notify possibly infected individuals and map their exposures to other people. They are also a link between the public health system and communities.
“Contact tracers are in part detective, part therapist and part social worker,” said Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Emily S. Gurley, the course’s lead instructor.
The chain of transmission snaps if contagious people are isolated before they infect others. Contact tracing, an old tool in the public health arsenal, helped eradicate smallpox in the United States in the 1950s. Contact tracers more recently have been employed to follow sexually transmitted microbes, Ebola, leprosy and other diseases.
The coronavirus is difficult to track because it is speedy.
“The incubation period is fast. This disease moves really fast, faster than Ebola or syphilis or tuberculosis,” Gurley said.
“People write about it and say it’s very hard to do contact tracing because there’s a pre-symptomatic, or asymptomatic, contagious phase,” Sharfstein said. It’s still possible to stop transmission if “you get to the contact before they are contagious. You just have to do it relatively quickly.”
Before the pandemic, about 2,200 contact tracers worked in the country, according to the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. Most states plan to expand their ranks of contact tracers dramatically.
“This course gets into ethics, and it has role-plays, obstacles,” Sharfstein said.
For instance: If a contact tracer uncovers that an infected person is having an affair, should the tracer tell the family? (Answer: No.)
Completion of the course, marked by a certificate, is a first step, Sharfstein said, because professional contact tracers will require more specialized training to understand how the virus affects local communities.
Contact tracers are more than professional bearers of bad news.
“This is about people working with humanity to stop the spread of the virus,” Sharfstein said. “This isn’t an activity of a cold, unfeeling bureaucracy. This is how we roll up our sleeves and protect each other.”
Similar to social distancing, “contact tracing efforts are only going to be effective if communities buy in,” Gurley said.
As they trace the virus, contact tracers are trained to provide support along with information. They can offer help with necessities such as laundry and meals, provide thermometers or masks, or help locate a safe place to isolate.
When asked about criticisms of contact tracing — that it is too slow or expensive to make a difference this late in the game, as argued by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey in an April op-ed in the New York Post — Sharfstein said contact tracing was not a “magic solution.”
But “it was a critical piece of the puzzle for a number of countries that have been very successful in controlling the pandemic,” he said.
South Korea, Singapore and other Asian countries aggressively deployed contact tracing to curb the virus.
“I’m really not swayed by the argument that it’s too much to put these systems in place,” Gurley said. “And frankly we should have more of them anyway.”