Audit: Contact tracing in state failed to meet goals

SACRAMENTO >> Despite promises from Gov. Gavin Newsom to build an “army” of contact tracers to contain the coronavirus pandemic, a new audit says California mustered less than half of the number promised.

But even if the staffing goals were met, it would not have been enough. The intended number of contact tracers was based on an assumption that California would average 5,000 new coronavirus infections a day. But the nation’s most populated state averaged 25,000 per day from late November to the end of December.

“The sheer number of cases has overwhelmed local health jurisdictions’ contact tracing efforts,” State Auditor Elaine Howle wrote in the report released Thursday.

Public health officials say one of the best ways to slow the spread of a dangerous disease is to contact infected people and retrace their steps. The goal is to identify others who have been exposed, contact them and ask them to quarantine before they can spread the virus to others.

Contact tracing was central to California’s strategy early in the pandemic. The Department of Public Health estimated the state needed 31,400 contact tracers. Newsom pledged to train 10,000 state workers and deploy them to help local public health departments meet that goal.

But by January, California had just 12,100 contact tracers, including 2,262 state workers.

That month, the state reported 834,000 COVID-19 infections. Local health officials tried to contact 85% of those people, but reached just 40%. Of those they did interview, officials identified others at risk of exposure in just 16% of total cases in January.

The audit comes after Howle warned last August that the state was at high risk of waste, fraud and abuse because it was getting so much federal coronavirus relief money. The designation authorized her to conduct a series of audits on how the state is spending federal money. Thursday’s audit focused on the $467 million that the California Department of Public Health received for testing and contact tracing.

Her report wasn’t all bad news for the Newsom administration. It praised state officials for far exceeding their goals for testing, which is crucial for understanding the progress of the pandemic. The state exceeded its testing goals by 1.5 million in November and 4.9 million in December.

Since August, labs have had an average reporting time of less than two days, which remained even when cases surged in December.

Contact tracing takes a deft touch, requiring people to cold call strangers and convince them to share personal information in the name of public health. San Francisco succeeded by training librarians for the job because they know how to deal with people and are good at using computers, said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and contact tracing expert at the University of California, San Francisco.