Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day sixty eight
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic, our main story
Speaker 1: in discussions about reopening regions for business, there's been talk
Speaker 1: of two big prerequisites, testing and contact tracing. Today we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the nitty gritty of that second one,
Speaker 1: how hard contact tracing actually is, and how one country
Speaker 1: is getting it right. But first, here's what happened today.
Speaker 1: An experimental vaccine is showing promising results in a small
Speaker 1: study of a drug made by the biotech firm Moderna.
Speaker 1: Patients immune systems were triggered to create a response to
Speaker 1: fight off the virus. The news is reason for cautious
Speaker 1: optimism that the global efforts to combat the pandemic will
Speaker 1: eventually succeed. The results are just a sample from the
Speaker 1: initial study, and the small study is designed to look
Speaker 1: at how safe it is to inject the drug into volunteers,
Speaker 1: but the study does suggest there are no major safety worries.
Speaker 1: That's a key hurdle to clear, since a vaccine would
Speaker 1: be given to millions of otherwise healthy people. Moderna is
Speaker 1: moving ahead with plans for a larger test to determine
Speaker 1: the right dose, as well as a phase three test
Speaker 1: with many thousands of patients. China will make its coronavirus
Speaker 1: vaccine a global public good once one is available, according
Speaker 1: to President Jane Payne, g spoke to the World Health
Speaker 1: Organization's governing body. As concerns grow that countries will put
Speaker 1: their own interests first in the quest to stem the virus,
Speaker 1: the w h O was pushing a proposal that aims
Speaker 1: to ensure broad access to COVID nineteen treatments and vaccines
Speaker 1: while offering an appropriate reward to creators. Also in China,
Speaker 1: some one and eight million people in the countries northeast
Speaker 1: are being forced back into lockdown. A new and growing
Speaker 1: cluster of infections there has caused a backslide and the
Speaker 1: nation's return to normal in an abrupt reversal of the
Speaker 1: reopening across the country. Cities in Jilin Province have caught
Speaker 1: off trains and buses, shot schools, and quarantine tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people. While the cluster of thirty four infections
Speaker 1: isn't growing as quickly as the outbreak in Wuhan that
Speaker 1: started the global pandemic last December, China's swift and powerful
Speaker 1: reaction reflects its fear of a second wave. Finally, in Florida,
Speaker 1: one of severn world u S states where businesses are
Speaker 1: starting to reopen, the state reported a larger than average
Speaker 1: increase in new infections. Florida is expanding its reopening today
Speaker 1: to include Miami Dade and Broward, the two most populous
Speaker 1: and hardest hit counties. Elsewhere, Governor Rohn de Santis is
Speaker 1: loosening restrictions further. Retailers and restaurants will be allowed to
Speaker 1: have customers inside at fifty capacity, up from in the
Speaker 1: initial phase of reopening. And now our main story. As
Speaker 1: countries around the world try to figure out how to
Speaker 1: live with the virus, a very old public health strategy
Speaker 1: is on everybody's mind. Contact tracing. This is the laborious
Speaker 1: process of tracking down everybody that a coronavirus patient might
Speaker 1: have infected. It's tedious and time consuming, but irreplaceable if
Speaker 1: you want to stop a disease from spreading. The World
Speaker 1: Health Organization has specifically praised one country for its contact
Speaker 1: tracing practices, Germany. The country has about a quarter of
Speaker 1: the deaths of neighboring France. Despite a more flexible lockdown.
Speaker 1: Last weekend, it continued its cautious move towards pandemic normalcy
Speaker 1: by letting restaurants reopen. Bloomberg reporter Naomi Kraski takes us
Speaker 1: to Wurtzburg, a region about an hour east of Frankfurt,
Speaker 1: to see what Germany is getting right about contact tracing
Speaker 1: m okay. Our story starts with Joachim Lazar. Infections were
Speaker 1: never his specialty. Joakim, who was thirty nine years old,
Speaker 1: is a social worker, not a doctor. But when the
Speaker 1: new coronavirus swept into Wurtzburg, Germany, in early March, he
Speaker 1: found himself in the thick of the war against it.
Speaker 1: He's one of the city's contact tracers. It's like detective work.
Speaker 1: When someone in Wurtzburg tests positive for the virus, Letzariic
Speaker 1: interviews them to uncover any trail of illness they might
Speaker 1: have left in their wake. Under that, I'm a kind
Speaker 1: you can't make any mistakes. You have to ask things like,
Speaker 1: for example, whether they're living in a small apartment, are
Speaker 1: you living with your partner and children? Is your grandmother
Speaker 1: also living there? Is it a large family? And then
Speaker 1: at work, did you take part in a meeting. Did
Speaker 1: you smoke a cigarette with someone on your break? Do
Speaker 1: you work at a hospital? For us, everything is important
Speaker 1: and you have to follow up very carefully. Unlike the US,
Speaker 1: UK and most other countries, Germany never gave up on
Speaker 1: contact tracing, even as infection is ballooned. Thanks to some
Speaker 1: of the world's toughest privacy laws, the country's three hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy five local health authorities could not rely on
Speaker 1: digital surveillance for help. Instead, they recruited everyone from medical
Speaker 1: students to firefighters. These contact tracers spend untold hours on
Speaker 1: the phone. Together with a lot of testing and the
Speaker 1: luck of having the German outbreak spread first and younger
Speaker 1: and healthier people, contact tracers are one of the big
Speaker 1: reasons why Germany has about one third as many coronavirus
Speaker 1: deaths per capita as the US. Mike Ryan, executive director
Speaker 1: of the who's Emergencies Program, recently praised Germany's testing and tracing.
Speaker 1: He said it puts the country in a good position
Speaker 1: to suppress the new infection clusters that inevitably will pop
Speaker 1: up as it emerges from lockdown, and he had a
Speaker 1: warning for those that are not putting in the same effort.
Speaker 1: Shoving your eyes and I'm trying to drive through this
Speaker 1: blind is about as silly an equation as I've seen,
Speaker 1: And I'm really concerned that certain countries are saving serves
Speaker 1: up for some seriously blind driving over the next few months.
Speaker 1: U S States are putting together their own armies of
Speaker 1: contact tracers right now, but they're starting late in the game.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, the country will need more than one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people like litz Artic, at a total cost
Speaker 1: in the billions. Utzburg is a case study for why
Speaker 1: that would be a worthwhile investment. Its first two virus
Speaker 1: cases emerged on March fourth, in people who had just
Speaker 1: returned from Italy. Infections mushroomed from there a young couple,
Speaker 1: a student and teacher who had been on a trip
Speaker 1: to the Alps, a handful of other school children. Most worryingly,
Speaker 1: the virus emerged in a local nursing home. On March twelve.
Speaker 1: An eighty three year old resident of that facility became
Speaker 1: the coronavirus is first victim in Bavaria and among the
Speaker 1: first in Germany. The health authority staff were already making
Speaker 1: calls begin at the beginning. There were actually only a
Speaker 1: few people doing the investigating, and then because the numbers
Speaker 1: were rising so high, we all started doing nothing but tracing.
Speaker 1: At first, it was like playing a public health version
Speaker 1: of Whackamore, Lazark and the other contact tracers to get
Speaker 1: their day's cases. During an early morning meeting, the positive
Speaker 1: the positive tests went to the tracing team, and then
Speaker 1: the tracing team would get to the phone. Because these
Speaker 1: people had been tested, we had their contact detests and
Speaker 1: in the conversations. The first order of business was to
Speaker 1: inform to inform people that they've had a positive test,
Speaker 1: and then to inform them about what that means to them.
Speaker 1: We had to tell them to isolate. People who test
Speaker 1: positive aren't allowed to leave the house. But then another
Speaker 1: big piece, something that is very important to me, is
Speaker 1: to give them information and try. They used a simple
Speaker 1: definition for contacts, everyone with whom an infected person was
Speaker 1: face to face for more than fifteen minutes starting two
Speaker 1: days before their symptoms began. These contacts also have to
Speaker 1: be called, told to quarantine and asked to track their
Speaker 1: health and write down any encounters, even something as fleeting
Speaker 1: as a package delivery person coming to the door. If
Speaker 1: they developed symptoms, they're tested, and for those who test positive,
Speaker 1: a tracer goes back to the beginning to investigate that
Speaker 1: person's contact chain. In the early weeks, the case is
Speaker 1: piled up. On March twenty, when Bavarian Premier Marcus Suder
Speaker 1: put the state into lockdown, Fittzburg had fifty four new infections.
Speaker 1: By early April. Ltzarik and his colleagues were working flat out.
Speaker 1: He soon found himself leading a team of other tracers.
Speaker 1: Then it did happen that we were doing the investigating
Speaker 1: for six or seven days a week and sometimes up
Speaker 1: to fourteen hours a day. They recruited medical students, youth
Speaker 1: welfare officers, and administrators from other agencies to double the
Speaker 1: number of tracers on the phones. Other recruits managed the
Speaker 1: tide of paperwork and data entry. They got a real
Speaker 1: database instead of makeshift Excel spreadsheets, counting everybody, including doctors,
Speaker 1: to manage who goes into and out of quarantine. The
Speaker 1: team swelled more than one hundred people. Let's Ardrek started
Speaker 1: training the new recruits. We look really closely at every
Speaker 1: single case and we talked together on the team about
Speaker 1: how to proceed. But slowly, social distancing started to reduce
Speaker 1: the number of contacts that had to be traced. On April,
Speaker 1: for the first time, there were no new virus cases
Speaker 1: to distribute in the morning meeting. By May fourteen, the
Speaker 1: team had released more than two thousand, five hundred people
Speaker 1: from quarantine and more than seven hundred of the areas,
Speaker 1: eight hundred and sixty nine virus cases had recovered, fifty
Speaker 1: nine people had died. Wurtzburg is just one small cog
Speaker 1: in the German contact tracing machine. On a federal level,
Speaker 1: Germany has said its aiming for one team of five
Speaker 1: tracers per twenty thou inhabitants, which works out to almost
Speaker 1: twenty one thousand tracers nationwide. There are some challenges, though
Speaker 1: The government has earmarked fifty million euros for a technology update.
Speaker 1: Critics say that's not enough, and a promised app to
Speaker 1: identify potential contacts based on cell phone proximity has yet
Speaker 1: to materialize. As Germany slowly eases restrictions on public life,
Speaker 1: Litzotic and other contact tracers are far from finished with
Speaker 1: their work. The number of German cases has picked up slightly,
Speaker 1: driven by local outbreaks and meatpacking plants and nursing homes.
Speaker 1: Chancellor Angela mercle said last week that health authorities will
Speaker 1: be the deciding point for whether these chains of infections
Speaker 1: can be followed and shut down. I can tell you
Speaker 1: that committed people are working there. They will manage this
Speaker 1: task and we will provide the necessary back up together
Speaker 1: with the States. That was Naomi Krasky in Berlin, And
Speaker 1: that's our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from
Speaker 1: one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot
Speaker 1: com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please
Speaker 1: leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners
Speaker 1: find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced
Speaker 1: by Tover Foreheads, Jordan's as Pure, Magnus Henriksson, and me
Speaker 1: Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Naomi Kresky.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Philip Corn and Karen Matusik. Original music
Speaker 1: by Leo Citrin. Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine.
Speaker 1: Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.