Excerpt:
Contact tracing, a critical part of efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, has fallen behind in recent months as covid-19 cases have soared. President Joe Biden had pledged to change that.
Biden proposes hiring 100,000 people nationwide as part of a new public health jobs corps. They would help with contact tracing and facilitate vaccination. Experts said it’s not clear that would be enough tracers to keep up with another surge in covid cases, even if the vaccination rate increases at the same time.
As with everything covid right now — testing, vaccinations and hospital capacity — ramping up contact tracing has become a race against time as new, more contagious variants of the virus threaten to accelerate transmission of the disease.
Author(s): Yves Smith and Steve Findlay
Publication Date: 11 February 2021
Publication Site: naked capitalism