The rapid spread of the delta variant, a slowing vaccination rate, and fewer mitigation efforts in place make contact tracing even more critical.
Health Department officials said they had to move fast to get a new company in place to perform contact tracing in time for the beginning of the school year.
Pennsylvania agencies turned to the emergency procurement process that avoids public scrutiny 483 times last year. In years prior, they made on average 135 requests annually.
State lawmakers are calling into question whether the Department of Health should be jumping into another, more expensive contact tracing contract after a severe data breach with the last company.
A spreadsheet of data was still online as of Wednesday, raising questions about whether the company, Insight Global, or the state can be confident they know where all the information might be stored.
Despite a massive hiring push last year, health agencies around the U.S. failed to contain the pandemic through contact tracing. Health leaders reflect on lessons learned and what’s next.
The state had planned to drop Insight Global once its contract expires at the end of the July, but the Health Department said it will instead terminate the contract early, on June 19.
GOP leaders on Monday also called for state and federal probes into the Atlanta-based contractor’s mishandling of the data, and what they said was the slow response by the Wolf administration.
