Great for SF! Now just need this everywhere!
As Goose mentioned in a post, the SM County DPH indicated in an email that they were “staffing up” contact tracing, but it’s great to see a large, major initiative like this! I hope SCC is doing this or will soon.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S...199505.php
San Francisco is building an army of people and training them in a simple strategy to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Several dozen volunteer medical students, retired nurses and city employees gathered at UCSF over the weekend to learn how to do what is known as "contact tracing." The technique involves tracking residents with the virus and identifying those who could have been exposed, and then interviewing and monitoring those people.
The program is a joint effort between UCSF and the city and county of San Francisco, and will be increasing SF's contact-tracing team from about 10 to more than 100 individuals. The city has been tracking cases since the virus was first identified in a resident in early March, but this program is "more aggressive and more robust," said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF who is helping lead the program.
...
"I think we ought to go and visit everyone of those cases in a hazmat suit," Brilliant said on Forum. "We ought to identify all the contacts. We ought to find all the contacts and then quarantine all of them."
Brilliant went on: "If we continue to do only mitigation, you run that risk of coming to that 'flattening of the curve,' and then we’re going to have to do the mitigation for months. I don’t think we should give up on containment. My experience in the small-pox program, which is a very different virus and we had a vaccine and all that, the moment we let up, for a moment, the virus came back."
As Goose mentioned in a post, the SM County DPH indicated in an email that they were “staffing up” contact tracing, but it’s great to see a large, major initiative like this! I hope SCC is doing this or will soon.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S...199505.php
San Francisco is building an army of people and training them in a simple strategy to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Several dozen volunteer medical students, retired nurses and city employees gathered at UCSF over the weekend to learn how to do what is known as "contact tracing." The technique involves tracking residents with the virus and identifying those who could have been exposed, and then interviewing and monitoring those people.
The program is a joint effort between UCSF and the city and county of San Francisco, and will be increasing SF's contact-tracing team from about 10 to more than 100 individuals. The city has been tracking cases since the virus was first identified in a resident in early March, but this program is "more aggressive and more robust," said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF who is helping lead the program.
...
"I think we ought to go and visit everyone of those cases in a hazmat suit," Brilliant said on Forum. "We ought to identify all the contacts. We ought to find all the contacts and then quarantine all of them."
Brilliant went on: "If we continue to do only mitigation, you run that risk of coming to that 'flattening of the curve,' and then we’re going to have to do the mitigation for months. I don’t think we should give up on containment. My experience in the small-pox program, which is a very different virus and we had a vaccine and all that, the moment we let up, for a moment, the virus came back."