The tracking of case contacts is considered particularly important coronavirus, as the Delta mutation spreads. This is noted in a recent article on webMD and is analyzed by the Professors of Medicine of EKPA Dimitrios Paraskevi (Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine) and Thanos Dimopoulos (Rector of EKPA).
At times when the pandemic was raging, professionals tracking contacts for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health often communicated with more than 100 people a day. Once coronavirus vaccinations were extended and cases were significantly reduced, contact tracking involved fewer and fewer people. However, the Delta mutation changed the data.
“Tracking needs to be further strengthened”
Tracking – the process of locating people who may have been exposed to a case and informing them that they should be quarantined and diagnosed – has returned more actively in recent months as a pandemic control strategy. , while experts believe that it should be further strengthened.
Many believe that the tracking process should be modified to include diagnostic tests and vaccinations.
“Contact tracking is more complex than locating a person and advising them to be quarantined,” said True Beck, head of COVID-19 Public Health in Los Angeles County. Ideally, he says, it starts with a phone call from a person who is able to personalize counseling.
How much can tracking contacts help?
“Any degree of contact detection can help break the chain,” says Amesh Adalja, MD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Lack of funding, however, is a major obstacle. “Public health infrastructure has not been adequately funded for decades,” he said, so it is not surprising that there are difficulties in the current situation.
He emphasizes that “the lack of cooperation in telephone calls was probably the result of conspiracy theories on privacy issues that were raised from the first period.”
Although the Delta strain is twice as contagious as the original, contact tracking can help control the spread.
Research with previous executives has shown that effective contact detection could reduce the number of transmissions by 3 to 4 times. We would expect a similar reduction for Delta executives, but the overall reduction in dispersion would not be so great.
We must emphasize that we do not seek a zero number of cases. The aim is to achieve the suppression of the spread among the unvaccinated.
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