Health
San Francisco unveiled a public health outreach plan Wednesday meant to help the city quickly test and identify people newly infected with the coronavirus, and to track down anyone they may have had contact with who could also become ill.
The program is meant to augment the city’s contact tracing efforts, which are a longstanding tool of public health to battle infectious disease outbreaks.
Contact tracing involves interviewing people who test positive for the virus about their recent interactions with others and their movements in public. The interviewers then call anyone who may have been exposed and advise them to take certain precautions to halt the spread of disease.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that contact tracing and widespread testing will be key to lifting some of the restrictions on everyday life imposed nearly a month ago through state and local shelter-in-place orders. Once people resume interacting with others, the hope is that contact tracing will help quench future outbreaks of COVID-19.
Contact tracing “is a vital public health tool, and we are scaling it up,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, head of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, in a news briefing Wednesday.
“From the beginning of this pandemic, we have emphasized contact tracing. But we need to be doing even more today and preparing for when we need more capacity to do this in the future,” he said. “It is essential as we ultimately move out of restrictive shelter-in-place orders into a new phase of fighting the pandemic.”
San Francisco’s expanded program, developed with UCSF, involves training dozens and eventually hundreds of workers to interview people who are newly infected, investigate those cases, and make contact with people who have been exposed. The process is designed to protect the privacy of people who are infected and those who are at risk of becoming ill.
People who are close contacts of the initial case and considered at high risk of becoming infected will be asked to quarantine themselves and be monitored over 14 days. San Francisco is using a new digital tool made by Massachusetts software company Dimagi to help with that monitoring.
Workers involved in the program will maintain daily contact — by phone or text message — with the people they have contacted. They will ask about symptoms and connect people with coronavirus testing and health care as needed.
So far, 50 people have been trained by UCSF to do the work. They include San Francisco librarians and staff from the public health department and city attorney’s office — many of whom are not working their usual jobs at the moment — and UCSF medical students. Colfax said he hopes to have another 150 people trained over the next few weeks.
And he would like to see the program expand across the Bay Area, eventually involving hundreds or thousands of newly trained workers to do the contact tracing.
Ultimately, contact tracing could require a massive workforce throughout the state. More online trainings are continuing in San Francisco, which could be a model for the rest of California. Massachusetts launched a widespread coronavirus contact tracing program this month and said it was the first state to do so.
“We want to get all the kinks out of it so it can be exportable to all the counties in California,” said Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious diseases expert at UCSF who has spearheaded San Francisco’s contact tracing program.
Once people who have encountered an infected person understand why they are being alerted, “they tend to be pretty grateful that somebody is paying attention to them,” he said.
Carolyn Said and Erin Allday are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid @erinallday
Health SF to use contact tracing to alert Bay Area residents exposed to the coronavirus - San Francisco Chronicle
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