Close contacts of COVID-19 cases being monitored daily by Quebec

Quebec has a new tool to help track people at risk of developing COVID-19. With no fanfare, the provincial health department on Tuesday began using a Web-based platform to monitor the health of people who are close contacts of the nearly 11,700 Quebecers confirmed to have COVID -19.

“The objective is to monitor the potential spread of the virus, to support decision-making with regard to relevant health-care measures, but also to adequately support the contacts of people with (COVID-19),” Marie-hélène Émond, a spokesperson for the health ministry, wrote in an email response on Thursday.

Through the platform, the health department now sends people identified as close contacts of those who are confirmed to have COVID -19 a daily email that takes them to an online form that asks them about any symptoms they might have.

The platform, developed by the Quebec firm Akinox Solutions Inc., is accessed by about 600 nurses and authorized personnel at regional public health departments around the province, Émond said.

The next step, she said, will be to add a function to the platform to allow it to track the evolution of symptoms of people confirmed to have COVID -19. That tracking is also through a questionnaire.

As a Montreal Gazette article explained earlier this week, Quebec’s regional health departments have teams of investigators who are tracing every case of COVID -19 to determine how they contracted the virus and, more importantly, who they were in contact with even before they noticed their first symptoms.

Close contact is defined as anyone who was less than two metres from an infected person for at least 15 minutes. For example, that would describe people who live in the same household as someone with COVID -19.

Eric Litvak, medical chief of infectious disease prevention and control at the Montreal public health department, said the investigators trace close contacts by having the person who tested positive for COVID -19 provide names and phone numbers of people they came into contact with while contagious and before starting self-isolation. Investigators also trace where the infected person was during at least the 24 hours before they developed symptoms and, as needed, contact the places.

Someone who lives with an infected person and who also develops symptoms will be considered a confirmed case themselves without necessarily being tested, Litvak said. They are confirmed by “epidemiological link,” he added.

The key to limiting the spread of COVID-19, Litvak said, is to have anyone who was in close contact with an infected person self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of whether they have symptoms. And if a close contact develops symptoms during their self-isolation, they have to remain in self-isolation until 14 days have passed since their symptoms appeared.