Tracing corps’ contact struggle

The city’s coronavirus contact-tracing program — a major component of its ability to beat back the disease — is struggling three weeks into its inception, with tracers securing contacts for just 37 percent of infected New Yorkers.

“In our lifetimes, we’ve never seen a disease this widespread and deadly as the coronavirus,” Dr. Ted Long, director of the city’s Test and Trace Corps, said during Mayor de Blasio’s briefing Monday. “Therefore, we’ve never had to set up a contract trace operation of this magnitude before in our history.”

Since the beginning of June there have been 7,584 new or suspected COVID-19 cases across the five boroughs. Of those patients, 2,808 gave information for people they’d been within six feet of for longer than 15 minutes. That means tracers reached just 37 percent of contacts for new cases, 2 percent higher than the previous week.

Tracers couldn’t reach more than 1,300 of the 7,584 new patients’ contacts.

The tracing corps’ goal is to prevent infected people from spreading the disease to others by contacting their associates and asking them to get tested and quarantine.

Still, Long hailed the results. He said more than 650 contacts reached by tracers were symptomatic and likely contagious.

“This group of 650 New Yorkers, if we did nothing, if the program did not exist, they may go out and infect three more New Yorkers each . . . We’ve potentially already prevented in the first three weeks alone of the program up to 2,000 new cases,” Long said.

De Blasio has faced criticism for putting the city’s Health + Hospitals agency in charge of the Test and Trace Corps instead of the Department of Health, which has tracked outbreaks of other diseases. The shift came following reports of tension between the mayor and his Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot.