Contact tracing key to reopening Pa.’s economy

But are there enough trained public health workers to do it right?

• Joseph Darius Jaafari
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  Joseph Darius Jaafari was a staff writer for the PA Post. His work covering crime, the military and LGBTQ issues has been featured in The Marshall Project, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Atlantic and The New York Times. He is a graduate of the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced for VICE and The New York Post. He is a native Arizonan and infamous for his love of tacos.

There are now 40,049 coronavirus cases across Pennsylvania, with 1,537 dead. The number of new reported infections has been averaging between 1,100 and 1,500 per day for weeks, and hospitals have, so far, not been overwhelmed by serious cases. As a result, the pressure to reopen the state’s economy is building.

On May 1, construction projects will be allowed to resume, and on May 8 we could start to see some counties reopen.

But what will determine that?

Gov. Tom Wolf’s office issued more details on Saturday, which remain based on a metric announced earlier in the week, specifically: “A target goal for reopening has been set at having fewer than 50 new confirmed cases per 100,000 population reported to the department in the previous 14 days.”

“For example,” Wolf’s office continued. “An area with a population of 800,000 people would need to have fewer than 400 new confirmed cases reported in the past 14 days to meet the target.”

But reopening isn’t just about how many cases counties have per capita, it’s also reliant on what’s in place to keep track of the spread: “Robust case investigation and contact tracing infrastructure in place to facilitate early identification of cluster outbreaks and to issue proper isolation and quarantine orders,” Wolf’s office says.

The Associated Press reports that most states don’t have much in place to do contact tracking, which requires in-depth interviews with people exposed to find out other possible exposures. In hard-hit Louisiana, there are only 70 hired to do that kind of work. In Pennsylvania, it’s unclear how many are needed, and even how many currently exist.

Among those people who are tasked with that are public health nurses, who are in charge of making the phone calls that notify people of their positive COVID-19 test. Spotlight PA’s Aneri Pattani takes you on a journey of what it’s like to make those calls to residents, the tedious repetition of the work and the heartbreaking stories they have to hear and sometimes counsel people through.

And while the state works out those specifics and counties keep an eye on case counts, veteran centers and hospitals are not looking too great, especially in the eastern part of the state. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that veterans inside state-run nursing homes are “sitting ducks” with the death count in one Chester County nursing home tripling in five days.

Best of the rest

• The 5G mania: Coronavirus conspiracy theories are bountiful. I attribute it to all of us being glued to our screens and going down YouTube rabbit holes. But the most prevalent conspiracy theory — which has been debunked repeatedly — is that 5G wireless communications technology is somehow the cause of COVID-19, and not the novel virus SARS-CoV-2. And as my friend Danny Gold tweeted, “I guess sometimes it’s fine, people can believe their nonsense, you can have a laugh at your favorite YouTubers & podcasters, but overall it has a tremendously negative effect [on] society as this pandemic has shown.” For The New Yorker, an opinion piece on how this specific conspiracy theory is doing harm to public health efforts.

• A daring escape from a nursing home: As the body count continues to rise in assisted-living facilities, family members are scrambling to try and figure out what’s happening to their loved ones. But in New York, that has proved to be hard as the city hasn’t released numbers and nursing homes have been tight-lipped on who gets ill in their care. For Frontline and ProPublica, watch as one daughter tries to learn what was happening inside a Queens Facility with her father, her daring act to get him out and save him.

• Leave the guns at home: In a complete 180 to the anti-shut-down rallies we saw in Pennsylvania and across the nation, a Tea Party-backed group, The Convention of States, is attempting to do a makeover of the protests. The group’s main advice: stop being crazy, and leave your guns at home. Mark Meckler, president of the group and also co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, told Politico: “When people are engaged in politics, the question is: Do they want to accomplish their goals, or they just want to go out there and do crazy stuff? And so you can have the right end goal, but you can still act crazy in pursuing that goal. I’m not in favor of that.”

• As Shaggy said, “It wasn’t me”: I guess those affairs were bound to be found. But who woulda’ thunk it was a pandemic that brought couples’ issues to light. Turns out, as more couples are spending time together 24 hours a day, they’re finding it harder to hide (or avoid) each others’ vices.  As VICE reports, it’s hard to hide how many drinks you’ve had if you can’t go to a bar. And it’s hard to hide that side fling if you’re always by your partner’s side. “They’re snooping,” one divorce attorney said. “They’re overhearing, they’re listening. Affairs are gonna come out more because, ‘Why are you locking yourself in your bathroom for so long?’ You know what I mean? People aren’t stupid.”

• COVID-related stroke deaths: At this point, we all know COVID-19 is a respiratory illness.  But here’s something new: we now know it’s attacking every single major organ, including the brain. Doctors are reporting that otherwise healthy young people who contract the coronavirus but show no flu-like symptoms are showing up with severe strokes — an assumption that was first noted during Wuhan’s surge but is now recognized through more tests and analysis in the states. From The Washington Post: “We are used to thinking of 60 as a young patient when it comes to large vessel occlusions,” one doctor said. “We have never seen so many in their 50s, 40s and late 30s.”

Your best non-coronavirus Sunday reads, ranked with most interesting on top (in my opinion):

• MEL Magazine: “The Forgotten Tiger King of Harlem”

• New York Times Magazine: “My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?”

• AFAR: “The Great Barrier Reef’s Great Big Complicated Story”

• Atavist: “A telekinetic teenager became a convicted killer. Can a group of strangers prove that Christina Boyer is really a victim of injustice?”

• Esquire: “The Life And Death Of An Instafish”

• VICE: “The Guide to Getting Into Cocteau Twins, the Hypnotic Dream-Pop Pioneers”

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