Zooming In: Localized Contact Tracing is Key to Success
In recent weeks, there have been many reports that, as it stands now, contact tracing is failing. Case counts are too high, testing is too slow, and contact tracers are having a hard time reaching people who have been exposed. But, a recent announcement by England’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggests it may be how we’re contact tracing that needs to be reevaluated, not contact tracing itself.
England announced that it will shift its contact tracing efforts and resources away from its faltering national program to local initiatives. The reason for the change? The centralized system couldn’t deliver the local intelligence needed to successfully squash flare-ups of the virus. In fact, national call center employees could only reach 51,500 of the 92,000 people - only about half - identified as close contacts of positive cases as of late July. By comparison, smaller teams of local health officials were able to reach 148,000 of 151,000 contacts - a whopping 42% improvement. Localization may be the big reason for their success. Why? Because it’s a more focused and concentrated effort. England’s major strategy shift may signal to other countries that it’s time to think smaller and take a more targeted approach if we want contact tracing to be more effective.
There are other examples of this stateside as well. For example, a recent New York Times article highlighted the intense (and very successful) model used to contact trace in Fort Apache, Arizona. The White Mountain Apache tribe members, who often live in close quarters or multi-family homes, were experiencing infection rates 10x that of the rest of Arizona when relying on traditional state-run contact tracing. But, as soon as they localized their efforts within the tribe, numbers began to fall. Why was this team more successful than others? They focused efforts at the community level, allowing for quicker insights and even quicker action. In fact, this method has reduced the death rate in Fort Apache to 1.3%, nearly half of what it is for the rest of Arizona.
Both of these stories suggest the same thing: contact tracing is more effective when individual communities take charge. When concentrated on a smaller subset of people, contact tracing can operate even more effectively. But there are several ideas of what can constitute a “community,” and one you may not readily think of in that context? Businesses. They have the ability to establish efforts around a specified audience, and can take the safety of their workers into their own hands. But, as we wrote about last week, relying on manual contact tracing will not be enough. In the workplace, businesses need hard data to make the right decisions about who to quarantine, when.
Wearables offer a reliable alternative- they can aggregate real-time information on contacts, even providing insight on high-risk zones or times in an office. Armed with this data, health teams can then spring into action and isolate cases or outbreaks with greater accuracy, so businesses can protect their people without sacrificing more resources than they need to.
At Proxfinity, we understand the power of localized network effects and how to manage them. That’s why we invented the ResCUE, a smart tech wearable device that businesses can use to better track and manage COVID-19 transmission within their offices. Each employee simply slips on a device, and companies can create an intuitive map of person-to-person interactions, how often and when employees came in contact with one another, for what duration of time and at what distance. From there, businesses can handle their outbreaks at the local level, similar to how the UK and White Mountain Apache tribe have done, as they occur - without having to rely on shoddy national programs.
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