While Tennessee continues to ease restrictions and people become more mobile, while many residents reject calls from public health officials to wear masks, the work of contact tracers for COVID-19 is becoming increasingly difficult.
Dawn Ford, a clinical associate professor for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s master of public health program, has trained around 100 students, faculty and staff at UTC to be contact tracers.
When a positive case is reported by the health department, the UTC workers will receive a list of contacts the person with the positive case may have infected. The workers then try to make contact with everyone by phone or text to tell those who have been potentially exposed to quarantine for two weeks.
The health department now employs 28 investigators, said Becky Barnes, Hamilton County Health Department administrator. Next week, the department will start using a state-contracted service to assist when there are local surges in cases, she said.
“We have encountered individuals that are positive that have more contacts than we have had in the past,” Barnes said this week. “Clearly, when almost the entire country was shut down, people didn’t have a lot of options. We have had people with more contacts, which is more of a challenge.”