County looks to double tracing capacity

As the state eases shelter-inplace measures, state and local officials say a critical component of doing that safely will be the ability to test people for COVID-19 and trace who they’ve come into contact with.

The county had tested 3,223 people as of Tuesday afternoon, and the county has seven teams with a leader and three contact tracers apiece to investigate the spread of the coronavirus, Humboldt County Health Officer Teresa Frankovich said at a press conference last Thursday.

“We’re actually building that capacity,” Frankovich said. “I’d like to see our capacity doubled on that.”

The county currently meets the requirement for the number of contract tracers needed, but Frankovich said more are needed because the job isn’t as simple as identifying confirmed cases, telling them they need to isolate and asking follow-up questions. You also have to determine who is a close contact, who isn’t and how far the investigation needs to go, she said.

The county is reaching out to its staff and individuals in the community to participate in a pilot project for a training platform that’s been developed by the state that Frankovich said is a “really important resource.”

“We have people participating in that right now,” Frankovich

said.

Testing and tracing will be important to determine a baseline of how much COVID-19 is circulating in the community and get better projections for when a peak might occur and how many people it would affect, Frankovich said.

As the county moves to Stage 2 of the shelter-in-place order, which allows retailers, manufacturers and other nonessential businesses to begin reopening with health and safety modifications, Frankovich said the county will be monitoring how quickly confirmed COVID-19 cases double, what percentage of tests are coming back positive and other factors.

“We will be looking at hospitalizations, but certainly things like death in our community are a late indicator,” Frankovich said. “So we really want to be watching those initial things.”

The state as a whole has conducted more than a million tests and is testing roughly 35,000 tests per day, 10,000 more than the state’s goal for the end of the month, Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his daily COVID-19 news conference Tuesday.

“A million is an important milestone in our efforts,” Newsom said. “It’s still not where we need to go. We need to get, again, north of 60,000 to 80,000 tests every day.”

Newsom encouraged residents to go to one of the state’s OptumServe test sites to avoid paying out of pocket to their insurers. OptumServe operates a testing site at Redwood Acres in the Eureka area.

“We’re trying to do our best to soften that edge and make sure people know that cost shouldn’t be an impediment to getting these tests,” Newsom said.

There are plans to eventually have universal testing at skilled nursing facilities, but the state currently doesn’t have that capacity, he said.

North Coast Assemblyman Jim Wood wrote on Twitter, in response to the reporter who asked Newsom about testing at skilled nursing facilities, that testing both residents and workers was needed.

“This is urgent and has to

be a priority as soon as we have the testing kits and lab capacity,” Wood tweeted.

To register for a COVID-19 test at the OptumServe test site at the Redwood

Acres Fairgrounds, call 888-634-1123 or go to lhi.care/covidtesting.