‘Contact tracing breaks the back of virus’

There are hundreds of healthcare workers engaged in contact tracing, the method by which trained health personnel interview people who may have been in contact with persons having contagious illnesses such as COVID-19.

It is a necessary part of efforts to restrict community spread and is what health officials have declared the “cornerstone” of preventive medicine.

On Saturday, more than 70 such health workers, ranging from public-health nurses, public-health inspectors, and health-education officers to community health aides, registered nurses, and parish managers, descended on Dover, Epsom, Annotto Bay, and Enfield in St Mary to conduct investigations into the genesis and modes of transmission of the new coronavirus.

The four areas are the epicentre of a spike in COVID-19 cases in the parish – 13 in total – prompting the Government to declare a 14-day lockdown of the communities.

According to Dr Patrick Wheatle, regional technical director of the North East Regional Health Authority (NERHA), contact tracing requires a massive logistics outlay to undertake and to mitigate against further increases in COVID-19 cases.

“Contact tracing is a difficult job, but it’s a job that we have to do knowing the importance of it, because if we do this properly, basically, what we could do is break the back of the spread of coronavirus, and that’s important,” he said.

“For St Mary, having done the initial contact tracing, it has allowed us to move those persons within the parish that were positive, so at least you remove that risk,” said Wheatle.

He added: “It will also, at this point in time, allow not just contact tracing but the whole aspect of surveillance to take place, where we can now get a feel as to the spread of corona within the communities.”

Last week, the health ministry announced that 13 people from three St Mary communities – Dover, Annotto Bay, and Enfield – had tested positive for the virus.

The quarantine is scheduled to end on May 21.

Cumulatively, the parishes that NERHA covers have accounted for 33 coronavirus cases, with 16 in St Mary, 10 in St Ann, and seven in Portland.

WIDER REACH

Wheatle said that health workers separated into two teams would have reached more than 100 households in both Dover and Annotto Bay on Saturday alone.

In total, healthcare workers would have done contact tracing in most of the households in Dover and Annotto Bay.

“The first intervention was searching for the first contact,” Wheatle said of the initial tracing exercise to locate St Mary’s first positive coronavirus case.

“This one is to get a wider reach, not just a conduit, but the average person who could be a conduit, such as taxi drivers, shop operators, and so forth,” he added.

Contact tracing would have tracked and unearthed the four new positive cases recorded by the health ministry on Sunday, with Jamaica registering 502 infections and nine deaths all told.

Public health inspector Jacinth Lewis-Bygrave said tracers are the foot soldiers on the ground whose pace and meticulosity can determine whether a wave is pushed back or overwhelms a community.

Lewis-Bygrave sought to explain that contact-tracing COVID-19 cases was often dicey – largely because infected persons could be asymptomatic, or silent carriers, complicating a surveillance regimen.

“It is really hard work, but thankfully, we have not met, as yet, any resistance. I think the people understand what we are tasked to do, and they are even asking us to go to their homes to initiate testing and tracing,” she said.