More in US can’t say how they got infected

When the coronavirus first erupted in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the spring, Mayor Paul TenHaken arrived at work each morning with a clear mission: Stop the outbreak at the pork plant. Hundreds of employees, chopping meat shoulder to shoulder, had gotten sick in what was then the largest U.S. virus cluster.

That outbreak was extinguished months ago, and these days, when he heads into City Hall, the situation is far more nebulous. The virus has spread all over town.

“You can swing a cat and hit someone who has got it,” said TenHaken, who had to reschedule his own meetings to Zoom recently after his assistant tested positive for the virus.

As the coronavirus soars across the country, surpassing 9.1 million cases nationwide, tracing the path of the pandemic in the United States is no longer simply challenging. It has become nearly impossible.

Gone are the days when Americans could easily understand the virus by tracking rising casenumbers back to discrete sources — the crowded factory, the troubled nursing home, the rowdy bar. Now, there are so many cases, in so many places, that many people are coming to a frightening conclusion: They have no idea where the virus is spreading.

“It’s just kind of everywhere,” said CrystalWatson, a senior scholar at the Center forHealth Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who estimated that tracing coronavirus cases becomes difficult once the virus spreads to more than 10 cases per 100,000 people.

In some of the hardest-hit spots in the country, the virus is spreading at 10 to 20 times that rate, and even health officials have all but given up trying to figure out

A coronavirus testing site Oct. 26 in El Paso, Texas. Hospitalizations in to issue a new order for residents to stay at home.

who is whom.

There have been periods earlier in the pandemic when infections spread beyond large, well-understood clusters in prisons, business meetings and dinner parties, tearing through communities inways thatwere nearly impossible to keep track of. But for the most part, that experience was isolated to hard-hit places like New York City in the spring and portions of the Sun Belt in the summer.

This time, the spread is happening in many places at once. Infections are rising in 41 states, the country is recording an average of more than 79,000 new cases each day, and more Americans say they feel left to do their own lonely detective work.

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“I was so careful,” said Denny Taylor, 45, who said he had taken exacting precautions — wearing a mask, getting groceries delivered — before he became the first in his family and among his co-workers to test positive for the virus.

Lying in a hospitalbedlast month in Omaha, Nebraska, Taylor said he still had no idea where he caught it.

Uncovering the path of transmission from person to person, known as contact tracing, is seen as a key tool for containing the spread of the coronavirus. Within a day or two of testing positive, residents inmany communities can expect to get a phone call from a trained contact tracer, who conducts a detailed interview before beginning the painstaking process of tracking

down each new person who may have been exposed.

“We were pretty successful, and we were very proud of how the case numbers went down,” said Dr. Sehyo Yune, who supervised a team of contact tracers in Massachusetts this spring.

It was one of several strategies that helped tamp down earlier outbreaks in places like Massachusetts, New York and Washington, D.C.

But as cases skyrocket again in many states, many health officials have conceded that interviewing patients and dutifully calling each contact will not be enough to slow the outbreak.

“Contact tracing is not going to save us,” said Dr. Ogechika Alozie, chiefmedical officer at Del SolMedical

Center in El Paso, Texas, where hospitalizations in the county have soared by more than 400% and officials issued a new order for residents to stay at home.

The problem is that failing to fully track the virus makes it much harder to get a sense of where the virus is flourishing and how to get ahead of new outbreaks. But once an area spins out of control, trying to trace back each chain of transmission can feel like scooping cupfuls ofwater froma flood.

In some places, overwhelmed health officials have abandoned any pretense of keeping up.

In North Dakota, officials announced could no longer have conversations everyone who may been exposed. Aside state they oneonwith have from situations involving schools and health care facilities, people who test positive were advised to notify their own contacts, leaving residents largely on their own to follow the trail of the outbreak.

When a first major outbreak hit Grand Forks, North Dakota, in April, the problem was clear: More than 150 employees of a wind turbine blade factory were infected. The factory shut its doors for several weeks, and public health officials tested and contact traced each case.

For the rest of the summer, Grand Forks, a college town on the border with Minnesota, saw almost no new infections. An uptick in August was quickly tied to students at the University of North Dakota and largely contained.

Now, though, any sense of control has vanished. Active cases of COVID-19 have quadrupled since the beginning of October to 912 in Grand Forks County, and about half the people contacted by the health department say they are not sure howthey became infected.

“People are realizing that you can get it anywhere,” said Kailee Leingang, a 21year-old nursing student who also works as a contact tracer in Grand Forks.

Even Leingang has fallen ill, along with several of her colleagues. She traces her case to her parents, whofirst started showing symptoms. Beyond that, the trail goes cold.

“They have no idea,” she said of where her parents came in contact with the virus.

Leingang, isolating at her home with her cat, feels sicker by the day. But she is still working, calling at least 50 people a day to notify them that their tests came back positive, although her job is no longer to track who else theymay have infected.

“With the high number of cases right now,” she said, “our team can’t afford to have somebody notwork.”