Local COVID-19 updates

[edschweppe]

As of 4PM this afternoon, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is reporting one hundred seventy four more deaths from COVID-19 (for a total of 2,730 to date), 2,379 new cases (for a total of 53,348) and 11,632 more tests performed (for a total of 226,845).

The Boston Globe had a report today about Massachusetts' contact tracing program (one of the most advanced in the US, which admittedly isn't saying much):

Dr. Emily Wroe started working for Boston-based Partners in Health, the renowned global health nonprofit, while still a Harvard medical student. She worked with the government of Rwanda to build a modern hospital in the country’s poor northern region, perched on a terraced hilltop surrounded by subsistence farms. Later, in Malawi, she treated patients with tuberculosis and HIV, working with community health workers to track down sick patients by foot and, sometimes, motorbike.

Now she’s building a new squad of public health workers. Only this one is based in Massachusetts and it’s a virtual one, 1,000-people strong. Their mission is to track down every person in the state who comes in close contact with an infected person and help them isolate, thereby slowing the spread of the deadly virus.

And this time, the tracking will be done by telephone.

[ ... ]

Massachusetts — which is testing more people than most states — is the first in the US to launch a contact tracing endeavor of this scope. The Baker administration has gotten so many requests for advice from other states on setting up similar programs that officials have teamed up with the National Governors Association to provide an hourlong webinar on the project next week .

[ ... ]

Less than a month later, more than 700 new hires have gone through the training program designed by Partners in Health, all by video of course. A contingent of the new contact tracing corps began making the first calls April 12, as part of a "soft launch." So far, the endeavor has reached out to more than 4,500 people, patients and their contacts.

That number will rapidly increase in the coming weeks, after the program goes live May 1, officials said. That’s when the complete staff of 1,000 will be set up in the state’s virtual call center, trained and ready to scour Massachusetts for everyone exposed to the virus.

[ ... ]

Dubbed the Community Tracing Collaborative, the program works like this: Every time a Massachusetts resident tests positive for the coronavirus, the results are shared with one of the team’s case investigators via a secure database. The investigator calls the newly diagnosed person and gathers information, including a list of every person the patient came in close contact with starting from 48 hours before their symptoms emerged.

"That’s because people can be infectious before they get symptoms," Wroe said.

The case investigator gets the names and phone numbers of those contacts, which officials expect to be about 10 people per new case. Those are passed on to one of the contact tracers, who will attempt to reach each one by phone, ideally within 48 hours, and urge them to self-quarantine.

I have to be honest; the fact that Massachusetts actually has a contact tracing program spooling up is the closest I've seen to good news in quite a while. If there's enough testing and enough tracing to stomp out new coronavirus clusters before they can grow, reopening at least some of the economy becomes possible. (We'll still need to see some long-term declines in the new case rates; I don't think we're there yet.)

The town of Acton has not posted an update so far today; yesterday's update reported a total of 63 confirmed cases.