Contact tracing
Fairly straightforward is the one proven strategy against the pandemic. It’s just testing, tracing, isolating and treating. Nothing fancy and doesn’t need much perfunctory dispensing of brain cells.
But why a number of government halfwits persist littering the public space with their dead brain cells other than propagating simple strategy is mystifying.
It is execrable why such litterbugs — quickly spotted by their brain-dead excuses to quickly blame their own failures by censuring and shaming public behavior during the pandemic — can even exist outside the gutter.
Anyway, what is there that’s hard to understand about mass testing? It is not hard to fathom that tests are simply to find out how many are infected. Isn’t it?
But getting round to getting more people tested stretched everyone’s patience, blocked often by suspicious characters who turned out to be both inept and corrupt, before our frightened public health officials finally got around to do tests.
Still, it is somewhat reassuring mass testing is getting ramped up, even if government fails to meet its own testing targets. Tests now allow us glimpses of some truths.
In fact, the increasing number of cases, which as of Sunday stood at 67,456, can be seen, as the World Health Organization (WHO) says, as a “reflection of the capacity of the country to test more samples.”
Mass testing, however, can only go so far. Increasing cases also reveal the fact that transmission of cases, the contagion, is dangerously getting out of hand.
Paying attention to the contagion problem is crucial. And, to get those who had been infected by the infected is where contact tracing comes in.
But why do we need this time around to wrap our heads around contact tracing, even if only on its general contours?
For one important reason — it is the only tool left largely unused in the fight against the pandemic.
WHO has longed counseled the country to beef up its tracing efforts alongside testing capacities. After another review this week, WHO said the country’s contact tracing and suppressing of the spread of COVID-19 is “a little weak.’’
The “weak” diagnosis is overly generous. Contract tracing’s celebrity cache never did compete against current watchwords like lockdowns, PPE, back-rider shields, masks and whatever else that fires up the public or government’s parochial imaginings.
To be fair, government belatedly realized how crucial contact tracing is in licking the
“Mass testing, however, can only go so far. Increasing cases also reveal the fact that transmission of cases, the contagion, is dangerously getting out of hand.
pandemic. Government recently appointed Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong as contact tracing czar.
Magalong has a full plate. For one, he requires 83,000 more contact tracers with the current number of infections, along with more money.
Knowing what contact tracing is also dispels what contact tracing is definitely not — as an operation against criminals as what Philippine National Police chief Archie Gamboa thinks it is. Criminalizing virus victims belittles if one cares enough about stigmatizing virus patients.
Alerting people is the goal of contact tracing. Alerting people who may have been exposed to someone with the coronavirus, then testing them, then isolating them, which in turn prevents them from spreading the virus to others.
The protocols for tests usually mean that after a person tests positive, a contact tracer needs to spend time with him or her in an attempt to determine where he or she has been and who they were around with.
Getting information, however, isn’t easy. Seeking the correct information means lengthy interviews, which might last an hour or more with tracers asking, hopefully, the right questions. Follow-ups are also required. It’s all plain old detective work without the guns.
After the interviews, the next step involves thousands of phone calls, text messages and smartphone apps to those who have been identified by a victim as having had contact with him or her.
All this effort to uncover other cases entails lots of hard work and lots of people. Ideally, a tracing operations team is made up of doctors, nurses and non-medical staff working closely with the contact tracing team to piece together identities of people and their locations. It’s a never-ending effort.
Other than identifying people who need to be alerted, tested, interviewed and confined, all the data gathered also gets us the bigger picture about transmissions, on how people were exposed and how they got infected and where the cases are piling up.
Analysis of the cases then yields for an epidemiologist a “visual map.” A map showing all the potential links of a patient to other people allows an epidemiologist to visualize where the spread of the virus had been and, more importantly, guess where the spread is likely going next.
Such a map is useful, too, in judiciously using limited medical resources and sparing us from lockdowns. Sadly, that’s not what has been happening so far.
“All the data gathered also gets us the bigger picture about transmissions, on how people were exposed and how they got infected and where the cases are piling up.