The Point Being’s latest mini-sode, featuring more social distancing made possible by the now-ubiquitous Zoom app, focuses on host Edward Celaya’s questions with Arizona Daily Star reporter Jasmine Demers about Pima County’s attempt at contact tracing COVID-19 patients.
As the news reporter in charge of the Pima County beat, Demers has written numerous stories since the beginning of the outbreak, from who among the county’s employees are considered essential to the temporary replacement of longtime-board member Richard Elias after his unexpected death.
Although not included here for space considerations, the conversation also included segments about who might eventually replace Elias permanently and Demers’ story of hope and resilience about a Tucsonan who experienced surviving COVID-19.
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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What is contact tracing? What is it important?
Jasmine Demers: Contact tracing is used during any type of disease outbreak, not just COVID-19. They use this to track the flu. They track the measles this way. So, really it’s just to identify anybody who might have come into contact with the infection in some way or another. This has been used across the globe with COVID-19 to determine who needs to isolate themselves for 14 days.
Here in Pima County, they’ve enlisted the help of University of Arizona students and faculty. They have a program, called SAFER (Student Aid for Field Epidemiology Response), and this program has been around for a long time. They’ve helped the state identify outbreaks for many years and they’re working on COVID-19 to identify those low-risk, day-to-day cases. They’re calling people up, getting information from them about their symptoms, getting information about their household contacts, things like that.
Then the county epidemiologists are the ones who are really focusing on those high-risk, cases like the public-health officials that have been impacted by this, they’re testing them. They’re also following up on clusters of COVID-19 in the area. But the thing that the health department has been saying is, they’re not getting this information right away, and sometimes they aren’t getting enough information.
Sometimes by the time they get the information that someone has tested positive, days have gone by. That kind of hinders their tracing efforts, because by the time they get that information and follow up, that person could have come into contact with somebody else.
Q: What information are contact tracers not getting?
Jasmine Demers: Right now they’re saying sometimes they’re just getting a name, and that’s not very helpful because they would need to find out what that person’s contact information is, their phone number, address, email, etc.
They have to kind of go back in, follow up with the person who did the testing and say, “Hey, we need more information on this.” That’s an additional layer of time that it takes for them to reach out.
Q: Who is doing the contact racing at SAFER? What is the point of contact tracing?
Jasmine Demers: They’re mostly students in the department of epidemiology. These are students that take classes in this type of stuff. If they want to volunteer to be a part of this group, then they would have to be vetted by the health department, which does their background checks. They have to have a level of security on their computer to allow them to access these files. They signed confidentiality agreements to make sure that they’re not releasing any information about the patient
My colleague Justin Sayers and I also spoke to the head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, Michael Worobey. He said that, although the health department is saying “It’s really difficult at this point with over 700 cases or identified cases in Pima County to be able to track all of these cases,” Worobey basically said that community-wide testing and contact tracing would be the best way to help identify and curb and outbreak. It’s just a matter of Pima County being able to do that and having the resources for it.
