Sacramento County will soon use a new text message and email-based notification and survey system to improve the process of contact tracing coronavirus cases.
The county says the program will let the local health office “contact individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 and anonymously notify those they have been in contact with about exposure to the virus,” according to a recent news release.
It’ll do this by emailing or texting those who test positive for the disease a link to a questionnaire. Those infected persons can then use the online survey to “confidentially share information about individuals they have had contact with and locations they have visited.”
The system automatically notifies those identifiable contacts of the potential exposure, doing so without revealing the identity of the positive case who self-reported that information. The county says it may also expand the system to create contact tracing portals that schools and businesses could use.
Contact tracing is considered a powerful tool in curbing the spread of COVID-19, doing so by informing close contacts of infected individuals of the exposure so that they can self-quarantine. That helps contain case clusters while they remain small.
“The quicker confirmed cases can begin isolating, the better we will be at preventing outbreaks in Sacramento County,” county Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye said in a written statement.
COVID-19 activity is increasing in Sacramento as well as neighboring counties. Sacramento County health officials reported more than 230 cases each on Thursday and Friday, two of the highest daily totals since summer. More than 500 county residents have died of the virus since the start of the pandemic.
Sacramento County’s new electronic tracing tool will use software from a company called Qualtrics, with which the county is entering a three-year, $1.6 million contract. The county in its announcement last week said it’s an investment that will save money over time by reducing the number of contact tracers and disease investigators needed by the health department.
The county estimates about 2,600 of its 27,530 all-time cases are still active as of Friday. While it’s a very rough estimate, the active infection total reflects how many cases potentially need to be traced. During the summer surge, Sacramento’s active case load ranged from about 3,000 to 3,600. In the county’s decline and plateau that lasted from September through early October, that figure bottomed out a bit below 1,700.
Contact tracing becomes far less effective in containing spread when the rate of new cases in a region exceeds what contact tracing teams can handle, hence the importance of streamlining.
Automating the contact tracing process has other advantages: It can make the process faster and simpler, able to reach more people and, as mentioned, cut costs.
At the more extreme end of the automation spectrum, though, it can raise privacy concerns. Some nations’ governments use cellphone GPS data to alert people that they may have been recently exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID-19. It’s hard to imagine that kind of government monitoring ever being embraced in the U.S., pandemic or not.
Sacramento County says that the Qualtrics system is compliant with all local, state and federal privacy laws, and that it does not use “automatic location tracking technology.”
It also works on an opt-in basis for the patients who test positive. Those who do not respond will still receive a phone call from a contact tracing investigator, as has been the standard practice for months.
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