Officials: We need more workers to trace cases
Department of Health officer looks to nearly double Orange Co. staff
As more cases of the coronavirus spread across Central Florida, the people tasked with containing new outbreaks say they urgently need more help to do the job.
Dr. Raul Pino, the Florida Department of Health officer in Orange County, wants to nearly double his staff of 22 specialists dedicated to tracing the whereabouts of infected people.
“It’s very arduous work,” Pino said. “You have to contact every single person you can get in touch
with to establish connections. Can you identify a common source?”
In Seminole County, where the cases of infected people has increased so rapidly in recent weeks that health specialists have had to scale back the number of calls they make, more people may be added to the current staff of 10 soon. Lake County is looking to hire nearly six more contact tracers in the next two weeks. Osceola County health officials are training additional employees to work as contact tracers.
All four counties have seen caseloads soar. Since June 1, new cases in Orange and Lake have tripled, Seminole has seen its number quadruple, and virus cases in Osceola has doubled.
Next month, UCF, which played a significant role in recent outbreaks in Orange and Seminole, will begin enlisting students to volunteer to work as contact tracers. That strategy is a key part of the university’s plan to reopen some in-person classes in the fall, which won approval from state officials last week.
A cluster of cases exploded after UCF students began visiting bars once Gov. Ron DeSantis allowed them to reopen three weeks ago, proving how crucial contact tracing can become during public health emergencies.
Since the pandemic started, contact tracing has also helped the Health Department uncover and link COVID-19 outbreaks to a mattress factory, restaurants, a construction company, long-term care facilities and other businesses.
Tracing is an old strategy that helped control the transmission of HIV and tuberculosis in earlier American epidemics. It can be low-tech and not very expensive, but it’s time-consuming and requires people who are trained to do the job.
They must interview infected people individually to determine who else they might have exposed to the virus, said Dr. Alberto Caban-Martinez, an assistant professor in the public health sciences department at the University of Miami.
Generally, infected people and others exposed to them are then asked by health officials to stay home until they are cleared by a doctor to keep the virus from rippling to even more people.
“The primary goal is trying to identify and control the spread of an infection,” Caban-Martinez said.
And the method works best while the number of cases is still relatively small.
“Once you get to the New York City level of an outbreak, it can be quite difficult to extinguish that with contact tracing,” said Dr. George Rust, a professor in Florida State University’s College of Medicine.
Stopping the outbreak, he said, depends on people following social distancing protocol and taking steps to prevent the spread of the virus.
“If we could get everyone wearing the masks, we would dramatically reduce the transmissions and we could go back to where we were,” Rust said. “We flattened the curve.”
In Seminole County, which has seen the biggest percentage increase in virus cases in recent weeks among local counties, health officials are scrambling to keep up.
As of June 24, 10 Seminole employees were monitoring 1,224 individuals.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, employees would call infected individuals and contacts daily to verify that they actually are following the rules and selfisolating. However, because the number of cases has grown rapidly during the past two weeks, employees can now only call every other day.
“It’s just been harder to keep up,” Harris said. “You reach a breaking point; you can only do so much.”
The county may soon hire additional staff, he said.
The state Health Department in Lake County has eight contact tracers but will add six more within the next two weeks, spokeswoman Noelda Lopez said in an email.
She did not address the county’s recent spike in positive cases, which have tripled since June 1.
“COVID-19 requires an unprecedented response at both the state and local level. Given that, we are not available for an interview,” she said in her email.
Orange County has dedicated 22 specialists to its trace investigations unit and Pino, the county’s health officer, has submitted a request for $538,000 in CARES Act funding to hire 20 more. Mayor Jerry Demings has promised to provide the money.
Osceola has seen a rise in cases where young adults contract the virus and then pass it on to older family members in their homes, said Jeremy Lanier, a spokesman for the county’s health department. The county has set up testing sites in locations convenient to those they want to target, including in places like food banks.
After more employees are trained, the county will have about 15 working as contact tracers, he said.
At UCF, Pino’s office worked closely with school officials when they started to identify clusters of students who were infected.
The University of Central Florida’s health center started receiving an influx of calls this month from students who tested positive for the coronavirus or suspected they had it. School health workers quickly pinpointed a common thread: the bars near the sprawling campus.
UCF and local health officials were able to identify others who possibly had been exposed because they lived or spent time around people who had tested positive and urge them to quarantine.
On Friday, DeSantis’ administration shut down alcohol consumption at bars just three weeks after they allowed them to reopen on June 5.
That move “could help in our case,” Pino said.
Even after officials warned about a cluster of cases linked to Knight’s Pub near UCF, which had its liquor license pulled by the state after officials said it wasn’t adhering to safety precautions, some local bars still remained crowded this week.
Few revelers wore masks on a recent night in downtown Orlando. Roughly a dozen people crowded around the bar at Bullitt Bar on Pine Street, where the music blared and a server pulled her mask down to her chin as she spoke to a customer.
General Manager Matty Bullitt said the bar was accommodating a birthday party of roughly 20 people that night and trying to encourage people to step away from the serving area after ordering their drinks. He acknowledged it was the venue’s responsibility to enforce health guidelines and said the establishment was doing its best to follow the rules.
But he added, “the social distancing part is very tough in the bar.”
During the first three months of the pandemic, it appeared the areas surrounding UCF’s campus in east Orange County and along the southern border of Seminole County had been spared the worst. But as the people testing positive for the virus in Central Florida get younger, the area around UCF became a hot zone. The university has now identified 116 students and employees who have tested positive. The vast majority of those cases were reported in June.
Dr. Michael Deichen, associate vice president of UCF student health services, said the recent surge in cases should serve as a warning to people not to let their guard down.
“This has been a wake-up call,” Deichen said. “We’re not having the easy summer that we had hoped for.”