Johns Hopkins University is offering a free course to train people on contact tracing, one of the tools that will be used to help reopen parts of the country as the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
Contact tracing is the practice of recounting any person that may have come in contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus and notifying them that they should enter a self-quarantine and get tested for the virus. With many states creating a bureau of contact tracers, Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health opened up a free course on how to best track down those who may be infected.
“Contact tracing breaks the chain of transmission of the virus,” said Dr. Kelly Henning, an epidemiologist and director of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Health program, in an interview with ABC News on Monday. “When a contact is unaware that they’ve been in touch with someone, or been close to someone who was a case, they go about their usual business, and they infect people all along the way.”
The online course will offer five hours of instruction free of charge to those who are going to become contact tracers for their state. The project is partially funded by former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The training is going to be used as a prerequisite for any person who applies to be a contact tracer for the state of New York. In a statewide trial, Gov. Andrew Cuomo plans to hire 30 contact tracers per 100,000 residents or as many as 17,000 statewide. While New York City requires that contact tracers have some experience as a healthcare worker, other states such as Massachusetts do not.
“Contact tracers don’t need deep medical backgrounds, but they do need to, of course, understand the basics around the virus,” Henning said. “They also need to be quite resourceful. They need to be able to find the contacts and use all those parameters that they have available to them to do that.”
While many states plan to create a government-run contact tracing team, some small-government advocates have warned against having a state-run program that requires coronavirus patients to disclose personal information about their whereabouts to the state.
Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 dashboard has become a popular destination for tracking up-to-date coronavirus cases around the world.
