Sonoma County public health investigators use critical ‘contact tracing' to detect spread of coronavirus
A team of Sonoma County public health nurses wear face masks, face shields, blue gowns, gloves and shoe covers, waiting for a caravan of cars, SUVs and pickups to start driving into a narrow downtown Santa Rosa parking lot.
One afternoon last week, the people who arrived in the vehicles, often families and couples, appeared a little bewildered. Many, however, are thankful to get a break from home quarantine, eager to speak to someone in person, someone who understands what they're enduring.
This is not just any Monday through Friday drive-thru county testing site to detect the new coronavirus. The people in these vehicles are unique. They are our friends, neighbors and co-workers, but there's a great probability they have COVID-19 because of their close contacts with others infected. Public health officials say identifying, testing and monitoring these high-risk individuals are crucial steps to control the spread of the infectious disease around the county.
This is the essence of contact tracing, arguably the most important tool deployed by the county's team of more than 60 public health nurses, investigators, epidemiologists and volunteer doctors and nurses doing the detective work to stop or at least slow the virus outbreak.
It involves long hours of sleuthing as the team painstakingly tracks a complex web of viral transmission, from co-worker to co-worker, wife to husband, parent to child. It requires medical professionals to be nimble, chase leads and quickly gain people's trust - as the health and economic well-being of the county hangs in the balance.
“I don't know how we'd be able to accomplish the really difficult, rigorous task of contact tracing without all these people,” said Dr. Sundari Mase, the county's public health officer who is leading the critical testing regimen and the entire local offensive to protect the county from the invisible viral enemy.
Already quarantined at home, the people who pulled up in their cars one afternoon last week to be tested seemed to appreciate the parking lot interaction with the county's public health investigators and nurses.
“It's not just let me grab a specimen. It's how are you doing? People actually like the connection,” said Julianne Ballard, one of the lead public health nurses on the front lines of the local fight against the highly contagious virus.
Ballard said halting community transmission of COVID-19 involves much more than simply ordering self-isolation or collecting a test specimen from a person with a greater chance of contracting it.
“Sometimes there's difficulty getting food to the home, and sometimes people are frightened about what may happen next,” she said. “We're here to help support people in this very challenging situation.”
Suppressing outbreak
County health officials say the stay-at-home order in place since March 18, related social distancing measures and other restrictions related to the coronoavirus pandemic have helped avoid doomsday scenarios predicted by early computer modeling of area cases.
That modeling for Sonoma County provided by Imperial College London suggested up to 1,500 ?residents at one time would be hospitalized when virus infections peaked in early June. Another batch of modeling projections, which take into account dramatic effects the unprecedented local public health emergency directive that closed most businesses and schools, parks and beaches has had suppressing COVID-19, is expected this week.
According to the earlier modeling, some 900 coronavirus patients should be in the hospital around this time.
As of Friday, there were only 23 confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients in local hospitals and three who needed intensive care, according to hospital data provided by the state.
Every local resident who tests positive for the virus triggers a new line of investigation for the contact tracers to find potentially more infected people.
The county's expanded testing, which started Saturday with a group of local health care workers, likely will reveal many more virus cases in the area and more threads to follow.
“Every day we come back to work and we wonder what the case count is going to be today. ... How hard we're going to have to work to keep that down by contacting more people and more people and more people, and it can be exhausting,” Ballard said.
During a wildfire, firefighters race to the fire lines to stop advancing flames. Their tools are fire hoses, bulldozers, axes and shovels that can be complemented by an aerial onslaught.
Against the COVID-19 outbreak, a slower-moving, mostly invisible threat, the comparable boots on the ground are public health nurses, armed with lists of names and addresses of contacts of others potentially infected. It's work that's no less urgent or vital than that of a police detective or firefighter.
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