Speaker 1: It's Wednesday, May six. I'm Oscar Ramiraz from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily
Speaker 1: coronavirus update. States around the country are beginning to get
Speaker 1: their army of coronavirus detectives ready to work. In California, specifically,
Speaker 1: the state has teamed up with two universities to train
Speaker 1: more than three thousand employees per week to become contact tracers.
Speaker 1: A robust system of contact tracing will be crucial for
Speaker 1: states to manage the spread of the virus as they reopened,
Speaker 1: and one estimate says that the country needs thirty contact
Speaker 1: tracers for every one thousand people. Rachel Becker, reporter at
Speaker 1: cal Matters, joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Rachel,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about the
Speaker 1: army of coronavirus detectives needed to reopen states. We're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about California specifically, but really this is something that's
Speaker 1: going to be happening across the country. States need to
Speaker 1: get a robust system of contact tracing in order to
Speaker 1: help limit the spread of coronavirus once things start getting
Speaker 1: back open and once the economy start moving again. So
Speaker 1: Rachel tell us a little bit about the plan that
Speaker 1: California is going through because they're using the University of California,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles and the University of California, San Francisco to
Speaker 1: help train a bunch of workers. Tell us about it. So,
Speaker 1: California has been doing contact tracing already at the local level.
Speaker 1: So the sixty one city and county public health departments
Speaker 1: have been conducting contact tracing for forever. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a cornerstone of public health for tuberculosis, for s t
Speaker 1: I s sexually transmitted infections, and for the novel coronavirus.
Speaker 1: But as the coronavirus keeps spreading, it's really taxed their
Speaker 1: existing staff. Some have managed to lean on county employees
Speaker 1: to help with contact tracing, but yesterday Governor Gavin Newsom
Speaker 1: announced that California will be kind of stepping up to
Speaker 1: help as well with what he called a training academy
Speaker 1: from the University of California, Los Angeles in the University
Speaker 1: of California, San Francisco, and this trading academy will provide
Speaker 1: twelve hours of online instruction eight hours of in person
Speaker 1: instruction to redeployed state employees in large part to help
Speaker 1: with contact tracing, and the local health departments in the
Speaker 1: state can request help and then they'll be assigned contact
Speaker 1: tracers that are part of this new workforce. Now, I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about the number of contact traces that
Speaker 1: we would need. The National Association of County and City
Speaker 1: Health Officials estimated that the country will need thirty contact
Speaker 1: traces for every one thousand Americans, So in California, that's
Speaker 1: about twelve thousand that they'll need. And you mentioned just
Speaker 1: right now that the governor plans on redeploying state employees.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of state employees to shift around. Is
Speaker 1: this going to be a potential for new jobs as well,
Speaker 1: Like will people be able to apply for these things
Speaker 1: or does it just seem right now like it's going
Speaker 1: to be state employees only. Yesterday Governor Newsom's said that
Speaker 1: they were going to be recruiting from state employees with
Speaker 1: kind of the right set of skills, including kind of
Speaker 1: what you call the health mindset, language skills, cultural competency.
Speaker 1: But whether that will be enough, how exactly they're being recruited,
Speaker 1: how many have been recruited already, and how many remain
Speaker 1: to be recruited. All of those are open questions that
Speaker 1: I'm hoping to get answers to. We're obviously going through
Speaker 1: a very tough time in the economy, and right now
Speaker 1: this could be a really good pathway for a lot
Speaker 1: of people that need a job to do some very
Speaker 1: valuable work, especially considering the time that we need right now.
Speaker 1: The only concern will be is after maybe a year
Speaker 1: or two, after things die down, hopefully, will those jobs
Speaker 1: be viable still. There's a lot of questions that go
Speaker 1: with it, unfortunately, but something that needs to be done.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about this before, contact tracing and kind
Speaker 1: of the attitude and a person needed to be able
Speaker 1: to do all this stuff. It is kind of a
Speaker 1: challenging job to call somebody cold calls a lot of
Speaker 1: times and then convince them, let's say, if they're positive
Speaker 1: they come in contact with somebody that's positive, to stay
Speaker 1: home for two weeks. It could be a pretty challenging job.
Speaker 1: It requires really a lot of people's skills. I was
Speaker 1: talking to one disease control branch chief in Riverside County
Speaker 1: and she said it can take multiple phone calls to
Speaker 1: really build enough trust to reconstruct someone's string of contact
Speaker 1: sometimes people will call the public health department to verify
Speaker 1: that the phone called they received as in fact public
Speaker 1: health contact tracer and not a scam. And it can
Speaker 1: take multiple interviews to really have someone trust enough to
Speaker 1: disclose whom they might have encountered. That trust is so
Speaker 1: important because having people willing to talk about whom they
Speaker 1: might have exposed is really key to identifying the chain
Speaker 1: of viral transmission that could continue to spread without identifying,
Speaker 1: testing and isolating folks who may have been exposed. So
Speaker 1: other public health folks I've talked to have really emphasized
Speaker 1: the need to ensure that there is wage replacement and
Speaker 1: paid sick cleave. So people are willing to be tested
Speaker 1: and willing to name folks that they might have exposed
Speaker 1: without worrying that they're going to be out of work
Speaker 1: themselves or that they're going to put their friends, their families,
Speaker 1: and their co workers out of work. Also, that's definitely
Speaker 1: going to be an important component to it, especially if
Speaker 1: you're basically telling somebody you've got to miss two weeks
Speaker 1: of work. Tell us a little bit more about the program.
Speaker 1: I've been reading that this new online training program that
Speaker 1: they're gonna be working on is going to help standardize
Speaker 1: the contact tracing statewide, which is great. I think if
Speaker 1: a lot of people working off that same platform, it's
Speaker 1: going to just help. And then it's also gonna sync
Speaker 1: up with the California's existing digital disease surveillance platform. So
Speaker 1: all this stuff to help everybody kind of streamline the
Speaker 1: whole thing. And I spoke with a local public health
Speaker 1: department officially yesterday who hadn't yet seen the training program.
Speaker 1: The state, as far as I know, has not released
Speaker 1: any examples of what the training will look like. But
Speaker 1: the idea that this public health department officer was so
Speaker 1: excited about was that this means that this a core
Speaker 1: of contact tracers will be trained the same way, and
Speaker 1: so you won't have differences in approaches across the state
Speaker 1: for those who are kind of pitching in at the
Speaker 1: local level, everybody will have the same level of expertise.
Speaker 1: And then this data management platform, again very little detail
Speaker 1: has been released from the state, but it's supposed to
Speaker 1: sync up with the existing disease surveillance system cal ready
Speaker 1: and so what I've heard, and again we don't know
Speaker 1: this for sure yet, but what I've heard is that
Speaker 1: this can import information from cal ready, so it's kind
Speaker 1: of a seamless transition. So if you get a positive
Speaker 1: test result reported on cal ready, it should be able
Speaker 1: to sync up with this new contact tracing platform. I've
Speaker 1: also heard excitement about the fact that this contact tracing
Speaker 1: platform will be statewide, which means that it will be
Speaker 1: easier to follow cases and contacts that cross county lines, which,
Speaker 1: as we see the state opening back up, will certainly
Speaker 1: occur more and more. It's good to see the California
Speaker 1: is starting to get the ball rolling on getting this
Speaker 1: system set up, and as I mentioned earlier, the states
Speaker 1: all across the country actually working on their own programs,
Speaker 1: whether they share some similarities or not. It is a
Speaker 1: robust system that needs to be set up to monitor
Speaker 1: the spread of COVID nineteen. So we'll keep monitoring it
Speaker 1: and see how it all develops. Rachel Becker, reporter at
Speaker 1: cal Matters. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks
Speaker 1: for inviting me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been
Speaker 1: your daily coronavirus update. You don't forget effort today's big
Speaker 1: news stories. You can check me out on the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, So follow US on
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