DPH: Contact tracing not new for COVID-19
♦ Local hospitals report the fewest patients being treated for the virus since March.
The opening of COVID-19 testing to everyone in Georgia will not only increase the need for testing capacity, but also the need for contact tracers to follow up on any person who tests positive.
Contact tracing is one of the terms that has been widely used in public conversation since the rapid spread of the new coronavirus in March — but Northwest Georgia District Public Health spokesman Logan Boss said it is hardly a new practice.
For COVID-19, epidemiologists working in contact tracing track down who has been around infected people in a certain period of time. Those people are asked to the disease self-quarantine risk as of well. them spreading to decrease the
Boss said contact tracing varies from disease to disease. In the case of sexually transmitted diseases, for example, epidemiologists often go out and talk to people those in order who have to properly been with inform an infected partner.
“With our epidemiological work on coronavirus, we’re able to do most, if not all, of it over the phone,” Boss said. “They talk to people who have been identified as having COVID-19 and try as best they can right now to determine who they have come in contact with over the previous 48 to 72 hours. They then contact those people while continuing the investigation into where the initially infected person may have been.”
All of the appropriate information is collected and entered in the state infectious disease database.
It’s an in-depth task, and requires training and education about the disease as well as a trusting and reassuring approach to ease the anxiety of the person providing what could be very personal information.
Boss said that, unlike contact tracing for some infectious diseases, they are finding that people who test positive for COVID-19 are very understanding and want to provide information to track down anyone they may have exposed.
The number of Floyd County residents who have tested positive for COVID-19 rose by one to 158 on Monday, according the Department of Public Health. The number of deaths was unchanged at 12.
Only four confirmed positive patients — two at Floyd
Medical Center and two at Redmond Regional Medical Center — were still being treated Monday morning as reported to the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.
The current number is the lowest it’s been since March, when the first confirmedpositive patients arrived in area hospitals. Neither hospital has any patients who are under investigation for having COVID-19.