Contact Tracing and Back to School During a Pandemic
It’s the million-dollar question – What will happen with school in the fall?
Spoiler: I’m not sure anyone knows. As one of my smart parents said last week, “It’s like we are building the ship while we are already on the water.” Well, yeah.
Most of us agree that from daycare to college, kids need to be getting back to school. And we know the schools we will return to in August will not be the same as the ones we left in March.
I don’t envy the thousands of school administrators and educational leaders who are tirelessly creating plan after contingency plan. I have faith, for my own school-aged kids and the patients I care for, that these decisions will be made diligently and earnestly. And I hope we will see the creation of science-led policies allowing school equity and progress.
One common thread in the school plans I have seen is the need for contact tracing. Contact tracers are individuals who are trained to identify and monitor people exposed to a disease. These individuals are important to help communities manage quarantines and limit disease spread. This expertise could be vital to keeping schools open, even as the cases of SARS-CoV-2 are rising.
As of now, many school plans have identified their reliance on local health departments to help with this work. There are already indications, however, that there will not be enough contract tracers to effectively handle the need this fall.
I wanted to share a tool that might help.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health has put a FREE, 5-hour course on COVID-19 contact tracing on Coursera. (No, not an ad —> Just an interesting find.) I would imagine that if every school had a contact tracer on its campus, health decisions might be made more effectively, swiftly, and hyper-locally. This could also decrease the burden of this work on local health departments, while allowing key individuals to manage our schools with care and attention.
This is all just a hunch, of course. But, I thought valuable to share. And, I mean, it’s FREE knowledge. Who doesn’t love that? This course could be a quick and easy way to get communities ready for fall, or at least add to anyone’s understanding of COVID-19. Win-win.
I’ll be eager to hear more as the weeks pass and update as we know more.
