A much-touted effort by New York City officials to prevent a “second wave” of COVID-19 outbreaks has gotten off to a “worrisome start” in part because a majority of people the city has contacted have failed to fully cooperate with the effort. The development follows the city’s widely reported decision to block contact tracers from asking people if they had participated in the Black Lives Matter protests or riots.
The New York Times first reported on the “worrisome” start to the city’s contract tracing program ahead of the city’s new reopening phase Monday, which includes the return of outdoor dining and in-store shopping, as well as many office workers.
“The city has hired 3,000 disease detectives and case monitors, who are supposed to identify anyone who has come into contact with the hundreds of people who are still testing positive for the virus in the city every day,” the Times’ Sharon Otterman reported Sunday. “But the first statistics from the program, which began on June 1, indicate that tracers are often unable to locate infected people or gather information from them.”
How bad are the numbers? According to the city’s newly released statistics, in the first two weeks of the program, just 35% of the 5,347 city residents who were believed to be COVID-19 positive provided tracers information about close contacts. By the third week, just 42% had been willing to provide key information.
The other problems plaguing the program include the sheer scale of the disease, “scant use of technology, privacy concerns and a far less sweeping mandate than that in some other countries, where apartment buildings, stores, restaurants and other private businesses are often required to collect visitors’ personal information, which makes tracking the spread easier,” Otterman notes.
Otterman cites Dr. Ted Long, the expert heading up the city’s Test and Trace Corps, as acknowledging that they were struggling to get people to provide information about contact over the phone, with some insisting that they had not left their homes and others leaving interviews before being asked. Some would not even provide the names of family members with whom they’d come in contact.
One “encouraging sign” Long could point to is that almost everyone to whom they’d reached out answered their phones, Otterman writes. In-person interviews, Long suggested, might produce better results. Contact tracers plan to visit those believed to be positive within the next couple of weeks.
These early struggles to effectively track potential infections, Otterman writes, “raise fresh concerns about the difficulties in preventing a surge of new cases as states across the country reopen.”
As The Daily Wire reported, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office made clear last week that the team of contact tracers will not ask subjects whether they attended a protest. “No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” de Blasio’s spokeswoman Avery Cohen told THE CITY. “If a person wants to proactively offer that information, there is an opportunity for them to do so.”
Related: NYC Blocks Coronavirus Contact Tracers From Asking About Protests
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