Contact Tracing is a Huge Success So Why Won't The US Use It?

A look at some individual states makes it clear that the workforce has not reached the scale required in several places. For instance, Arkansas recently announced plans to hire 350 new contact tracers, which would bring its total to about 900. But based on the number of current cases, the state actually needs 3,722 tracers, according to a contact-tracing-workforce estimator developed by the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University. In Florida, where the pandemic is surging terribly, the same estimator calculates that 291 tracers per 100,000 residents are needed. Yet as of early July, the state had only seven per 100,000. And cases of COVID-19 surged in Texas, even as contact tracers working for the Texas Department of State Health Services were taken off the job. Read full article here.