The truth about the coronavirus and contact tracing — finding out who is infected, who else might have been exposed by an infected person and then isolating those people — is that national and local public health departments have had to cobble together old and new technologies to track the spread of COVID-19.
And in some cases, departments have had to jury-rig solutions to minimize the many hours of manual labor it takes to do thorough contact tracing as the volume of cases has swamped the capacity of agencies to cope with the pandemic.
Health departments have had to rely on databases and information systems developed by a handful of private companies as well as one developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They have been in use for more than two decades to track the spread of dozens of diseases ranging from salmonella infections and rabies to tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola and others.
Makers of the databases and public health officials quickly developed modules earlier this year to track COVID-19 by adapting ones used to track other coronaviruses, such as the ones linked to SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which first appeared in 2002, and MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome that emerged in 2012.
Private companies also are offering contact tracing as a service, providing trained personnel to states on a contract basis to call patients who test positive to figure out who else they have been in touch with.
