State asks National Guard for 500 people to help with coronavirus contact tracing work
Washington state is asking the National Guard to provide 500 people to help ramp up contact tracing as part of what Gov. Jay Inslee called a gradual, safe return to public life when the COVID-19 pandemic has waned enough.
The governor said on Tuesday, April 21, that return depends, in part, on having testing widely available — the goal is up to 30,000 tests a day — for residents who may have contracted the new coronavirus coupled with having enough workers and volunteers to interview those who tested positive in order to find their close contacts.
Inslee said the state is now processing about 4,000 tests a day because of barriers to getting supplies needed for testing. He has asked Vice President Mike Pence for a “robust” national testing system.
A close contact is someone who was within six feet for 10 minutes or more of a person who tested positive for the virus while that person may have been infectious.
Such interviews and contact investigations are key to quickly finding people who need to be isolated or quarantined so they don’t spread the respiratory illness, public health officials said.
Right now, there are 700 public health officials at the state and local level who handle those responsibilities, according to John Wiesman, secretary of health for Washington state.
Another 800 need to be trained and onboard by the second week of May, Wiesman said during a briefing to reporters on Wednesday, April 22. A big chunk of that would come from the National Guard. Other health care professionals also may be trained as part of the effort to more than double to 1,500 the number of people conducting interviews and contact tracings on an ongoing basis.
“This is going to be a long-term effort,” Wiesman said.
Such efforts will need to continue until there’s a vaccine or “herd immunity,” he said.
Herd immunity occurs when enough of the population is immune to infectious disease because they’ve been vaccinated or have already been sickened by it, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also called “community immunity,” the CDC said it also means that the spread from person to person is unlikely.
As for the testing itself, the goal is to have results back in 24 hours, 48 hours at the latest, Dr. Charissa Fotinos, deputy chief medical officer for the Washington State Health Care Authority, said on Wednesday.
The governor didn’t say on Tuesday when he might lift his stay-at-home order and the closure of “non-essential businesses,” though he did warn that many of the restrictions wouldn’t be lifted by May 4, the current end date for his order.
Inslee said during a briefing on Wednesday that modeling information he expects to receive on Thursday could provide him with the next steps as it relates to easing restrictions.
“This has been working. This is saving lives,” Inslee said on Wednesday of his statewide social-distancing order, which has been in place since March 23.
This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 5:43 PM with the headline "State asks National Guard for 500 people to help with coronavirus contact tracing work."
