-Inside this government building,
in this room is a new front in the fight against coronavirus.
-So the only symptoms that you have right now
is just the mild body pain?
Is that correct?
-At a call center in Fairfax County, Virginia,
outside Washington,
employees with the Public Health Department
are doing contact tracing for the virus.
-When we do reach people,
it is important for them to understand why we're calling.
There is a sense of unease about the COVID-19 pandemic.
And to have somebody from the government calling
is often perceived as intrusive.
-And at any moment, were you admitted into the hospital?
-Doing this sort of detective work will be key
to getting the country moving again.
-Testing widely, isolating those who are infected,
contact tracing, and quarantining the contacts.
That's a box. You get those four things right,
you can keep a virus in the box so we can come out more readily.
-Contact tracing or infection control works like this.
It requires large scale testing to identify who has the virus.
Once someone does, they're interviewed,
asked to remember who they've interacted with
at a range of closer than six feet for 15,
maybe up to 30 minutes over the last two to three days.
The contact tracer then calls all of those people,
telling them they've been exposed
to someone with the virus,
recommending they isolate themselves,
limiting contact with other people for the next 14 days.
The contact tracer may then follow up to see
how people are feeling and to remind them to stay inside.
-Wear a face mask, bandana, or scarf.
-All of this is nothing new for those in public health.
-We do it all the time.
We do it for sexually transmitted infections.
We do it for tuberculosis.
And some people will remember last year
when we had the big measles outbreaks in New York state
and in the Pacific Northwest,
we used contact tracing and infection control
to get all of that under control.
-Marcus Plescia is chief medical officer
with the Association of State
and Territorial Health Officials,
which represents every state's public health department.
-Our approach is that by strengthening
those interventions,
we can keep the spread of the virus tamped down.
-The challenge now is finding help.
-We don't have the numbers.
I mean, there are so many more people
getting infected with this
than any of the other infections that we routinely handle.
-There are only a couple thousand people in the US
who normally do contact tracing.
-We're going to need tens or hundreds of thousands
of people doing this.
It sounds overwhelming, but we've got to do it.
-When Tom Frieden was director
for the Centers For Disease Control,
he oversaw the response to the Ebola epidemic in 2014.
-We all want to get out.
We all need to resume our economy,
our healthcare system, our businesses.
That's essential for our lives.
But being safe while doing it is going to require
going about it in a different way.
And part of that is scaling up our ability to contact trace
and box the virus in.
-The state of Massachusetts has brought on Partners In Health
to hire and train people in contact tracing.
The non-profit has mostly worked in the developing world,
battling Ebola and HIV.
In New York.
-What we have to put together -- a tracing army.
Yes, okay, we've put together armies before.
Never a tracing army.
-Doing all of this well means -- -A really good contact tracer
is gonna be personable.
They're gonna have good communication skills,
able to get on the phone with somebody
and win their trust pretty quickly,
able to speak in a way that is credible for the folks
that they're dealing with.
-Plescia says there used to be more contact tracers
out in the field, but over the years,
public health budgets have been cut by a third.
The CDC also does this kind of work.
Albany, Georgia, had one of the earliest
and deadliest coronavirus outbreaks,
stretching the only hospital there.
-I was sort of perplexed because when I found out
these individuals from the CDC were coming down,
I thought their primary objective
was to assist us in curbing the spread of the virus.
But actually, they are here as infectious disease specialists.
It's what they call contract tracing.
And what they are trying to do is establish this pattern
so that the virus can be combated
more effectively elsewhere.
-But combating it will take testing and contact tracing
and more testing,
which is still an issue in many parts of the country.
-Do you agree with Dr. Fauci
that we're just not there yet?
-Uh, no, I don't agree with him on that.
No, I think we're doing a great job on testing.
I don't agree.
If he said that, I don't agree with him.
-The plain fact is we don't have enough tests in the US today,
so we're going to have to test strategically,
especially people who might spread it widely or for
whom testing will help to save their life.
-In other countries, cellphone apps are tracking
who has the virus and warning people
when they encounter someone who's infected.
This sort of surveillance could happen in the US,
but it would be voluntary, given worries about privacy.
So contact tracing here will largely be done
the old fashioned way. -Okay.
-I would ask, if you have been ill or if someone in your family
has been ill or been tested, that if you get a call,
that even if you are reluctant to pick up the phone,
that you listen to the voice mail.
-And the public needs to be prepared for this.
-We need people to know that this is coming.
We need them to know that although we're opening back up,
there are going to be some cases where people are going to be
contacted and asked to go back and stay in their homes again
for a couple of weeks.
But we need everybody to be in this together.
Everybody needs to realize that you have to do that
because that's the right thing to do to get us through this.
Everybody's got to do their part.
-Okay, all right. Thank you so much.
Mm-hmm. Bye-bye.