Read on Twitter
1/ A new essential job is emerging in the "trace, test, contain" #COVID19 world: the contact tracer. Some countries will need to hire tens and hundreds of thousands of people. Not an insignificant amount given job losses in other sectors.
2/ Why essential? If we are to reopen economies in some capacity, we have to prevent outbreaks from turning into sustained community transmission. This needs to happen rapidly and early.
3/ But it requires an army of contact tracers. It takes 4-5 people over 3 days to do one full contact trace, on average, @ProPublica reports citing @ASlavitt: https://twitter.com/propublica/status/1253352107056529409?s=20
4/ Experience from Chicago in January shows one team monitored almost 350 contacts on the basis of just 2 initial infected individuals: https://www.ft.com/content/a13c4ac8-82eb-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714
5/ The US (330m population) will need to hire at least 100,000 people to handle contact tracing at an estimated cost of about $3.6b for 1y, according to a study by @JohnsHopkins: https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/pubs_archive/pubs-pdfs/2020/200410-national-plan-to-contact-tracing.pdf
6/ China sent 9,000 contact tracers (1,800 teams of 5 people) to Wuhan (11m ppl) alone, according to WHO.
7/ But country approaches vary. NZ (4.8m ppl) deployed 150 contact tracers (=4 contact tracers per 100,000ppl); Iceland (364,000ppl) deployed dozens of contact tracers (=7 contact tracers per 100,000ppl) and both contained early, VS. 81 contact tracers per 100,000ppl in #Wuhan.
8/ Belgium (11.5m) plans to hire ca 2,000 contact tracers in the near future: https://www.lesoir.be/295811/article/2020-04-21/coronavirus-la-belgique-va-recruter-des-enqueteurs-pour-identifier-les-citoyens
9/ The job boils down to painstaking detective work - identify infected people, isolate them, track down anyone in recent contact with them, monitor their health. This means compiling contacts, doing interviews, mapping out the spread, type of exposure, etc. It's very contextual.
10/ Some countries (Singapore, S Korea, etc.) have supplemented traditional contact tracing with heavy use of tech - e.g. GPS phone tracking, surveillance camera records, credit card transactions, syncing with other databases, etc. But technology ALONE can't do the job.
11/ @iamjohnegan wrote a great thread about the protection vs. #privacy dilemma for such technology: https://twitter.com/iamjohnegan/status/1249952437429063681?s=20
12/ Who makes a good contact tracer? Detectives, journalists, ethnographers, researchers, etc. But NOT only. Acc. to job postings, key skills are:
- critical thinking
- good communication skills
- empathy
- NO advanced degree or previous public health education required
- critical thinking
- good communication skills
- empathy
- NO advanced degree or previous public health education required
13/ Here's one job posting for a contact tracer in Massachusetts, which plans to hire 1,000: https://jobs.crelate.com/portal/talentboost/job/3kyqki4zeqoyugdzsha5iynhce #contact_tracing
