Boost COVID-19 contact tracing

THERE must be an aggressive boost in the contact tracing systems of the Department of Health (DOH) as part of a medically-informed tactic to control if not stop the spread of COVID-19. This is one of the best practices of other countries. South Korea, for example, has decisively adopted systematic contact tracing since it is necessary to contain the ongoing transmission of the COVID virus and reduce the spread of infection. 

The Philippine government has to ramp up our contact tracing capacities so we will not be blind as to where and how worse COVID really is. Broad measures such as community quarantines or lockdowns are unsustainable in the long run. It would be foolhardy for government to order “stay at home” while doing little to contain the spread of the virus outside homes.  But with the medically-informed tactic contact tracing, trains of COVID transmission can be cut and the spread can be contained, allowing a more targeted quarantine for fewer people while the rest of society begins to open up partially.

To ramp up contact tracing, there must be massive hiring, training and deployment of “tracer teams” to effectively track contacts of persons who test positive for the virus. They will act as sort of “disease detectives,” tracking the COVID virus starting from confirmed infected patients to persons who may have been infected or at risk of being infected.

A boost in the personnel capacity for contact tracing should also be in tandem with a massive hiring of doctors, nurses, and other health workers and technical personnel in COVID-19 testing and care for patients. We need them to be regular employees, since they will be performing essential functions to contain the pandemic and their tasks will last for as long as COVID is within Philippine shores.

Per the World Health Organization, contact tracing has three steps: contact identification, contact listing, and contact follow-up.  Contact identification requires interviewing those who test positive for COVID-19 about their activities and the people around them from first presentation of symptoms.  These contacts may be “close contacts” or “casual contacts”; the longer and closer the exposure, the higher the risk of contracting the virus from the confirmed patient.

Effective contact tracing is hard, but not impossible.  Other countries have done it like South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and their efforts paid with lowered numbers of COVID infections and deaths.  We should learn from them.