CT tracers reaching less than half of contacts
Since August, the state has been able to reach fewer than half of the people who might have come into contact with COVIDpositive patients, according to data obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media.
Connecticut has budgeted millions of dollars in contact-tracing efforts, and although the state says it’s meeting its benchmarks, some say precious days went by before they were contacted after testing positive.
“In order to really trace people, they probably need to be a little faster in their contacts,” said Katina McGrath of Torrington, who said she was contacted by a contact tracer days after testing positive for COVID.
When a person in Connecticut is diagnosed with COVID-19, the state attempts to interview them and everyone with whom
they have come into contact.
In total, Connecticut attempted interviews on 158,330 cases and 58,747 contacts between August and January. Of those attempted interviews, 57.9 percent of cases (91,660) and 42.7 percent of contacts (25,113) were successfully reached, according to state data.
A “case,” according to Department of Public Health spokesperson Maura Fitzgerald, is defined as “an individual who has tested positive for COVID.”
“A contact is someone who has been identified as an individual who has come into contact with a case,” Fitzgerald said by email.
Researchers say speed is the most important factor for contact tracing to be effective at halting the spread of the virus.
Dan Larimer of Boston and Harvard Universities said the intention is to “find the people who are infected, find the people who may have infected them, or who they may have infected.”
But Barbara Zocco of Newington said she was never alerted after her neighbor was diagnosed, either by phone or through the COVID Alert CT cell phone app she enabled.
Her family was in a pandemic bubble with the neighbors, and Zocco said she had spent 45 minutes in a car with a neighbor on Dec. 12. Their kids often played together.
The neighbor tested positive on Dec. 15. Zocco’s 9year-old daughter tested positive on Dec. 18, and she was first reached by a contact tracer on Dec. 23. Eventually, the whole family tested positive for the coronavirus.
McGrath said she was reached by a contact tracer on day three after she tested positive at the local Walgreens.
“I got my positive on Jan. 28, Thursday,” she said. “They called me Saturday morning.”
Larimer is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Computer Science, and works at the Harvard School of Public Health Center on infectious disease modeling.
He said contact tracing is a key piece of any viral mitigation strategy.
“Test, trace, isolate is kind of bread-and-butter epidemiology,” Larimer said. “Both forward and backward contact tracing, and then isolate folks while they're recovering so that they don't infect any other people.”
The problem, Larimer said, is time lag. When it takes too long to identify a case and to test and isolate contacts, the strategy becomes less effective. Part of that is an issue with the speed of test results, but tracing as well as testing needs to happen as quickly as possible.
“If I tell you that there were embers that were blowing onto your roof a day ago, when you get to that spot to try and put out the fire, it's really going to have grown. That information that I gave you with some delay is really not going to be valuable,” he said. “That's what's currently happening with the contact tracing efforts. We're just getting the information so late, that the contact tracing is, in effect, a waste of time.”
McGrath said she was surprised at how long it took to be contacted.
“I thought they would have called sooner, to be honest,” she said.
The state, however, is hitting its contact tracing targets. The goal, Fitzgerald said, is to attempt interviews with 90 percent and successfully interview 50 percent of the state’s cases and contacts.
“We consistently achieve our benchmarks,” Fitzgerald said.
Connecticut’s contact tracing system, known as ContaCT, currently employs 242 contact tracers, 21 supervisors and 19 community outreach specialists, who Fitzgerald said are employed to “conduct general and targeted contact tracing and outreach intended to maximize contact with vulnerable populations.”
There are also 132 volunteers on the state team of contact tracers
When the system got going in May, the state budgeted $23.8 million for the ContaCT system, of which $6.7 million has been invoiced by AMN Healthcare, which manages the Microsoft-designed program.
When a patient is contacted, they are asked a series of questions, Fitzgerald said: “Cases are called and when they speak to them, they are asked, confidentially, about where they have been, who they have been in close contact with, how they are feeling, if they need any services while in quarantine, etc. That's the interview.”
In practice, it is not always so formulaic. McGrath said she thought she knew how she contracted COVID, but was never asked.
“They didn’t ask who I thought I got it from. They asked who I had been in contact with two days prior to the diagnosis,” she said. “For me it was just my husband and one coworker. They asked for that coworker’s number.”
Zocco said she was contact-traced twice, once after her daughter tested positive, and again when she tested positive.
There were commonalities to the phone calls but the first, when her daughter tested positive, was far more thorough.
“It definitely seemed like there was a checklist,” she said.
Afterwards, both Zocco and McGrath received texts, checking up on their symptoms and their efforts to quarantine.
“They sent me a text for seven days,” McGrath said, “asking on day one about my contacts up to two days before symptoms or positive test, then the daily text was a series of questions about symptoms, temp, blood oxygen level, if I was able to stay quarantined safely, any needs to remain quarantined.”
Ultimately, Zocco said she informed everyone they had come into contact with out of a sense of civic duty.
“My daughter was in dance, we contacted the dance studio. We contacted the neighbors,” she said. “I just think it’s your responsibility.”