Contact Tracing Isn’t Keeping Up With America’s Reopening

​More interactions create more work for contact tracing teams that have to reach more people and convince them to isolate. A spokesperson for Florida’s Department of Health said the state has more than 2,300 people working on contact tracing. That is less than 10% of the 33,000 tracers needed, according to the Contact Tracing Workforce Estimator, a simulator developed by the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at the George Washington University. The tool estimates that the nation needs more than 218,000 contact tracers overall,
though the number continues to grow alongside the uptick in U.S. cases since states reopened. There is no reliable estimate for how many contact tracers are working across the entire U.S. Read More.