C19 Notes
General Category => C19 Notes Database => Topic started by: stog on May 15, 2020, 05:14:32 PM
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As an epidemiologist, I know how well contact tracing could work for coronavirus Keith Neal
As quarantine measures are slowly lifted in the UK, the virus will continue to spread unless the government puts in place a strategy to curb the rate of infection. Contact tracing, a practice long used in public health to control infectious diseases, will be crucial to driving down the rate of infection, or R, and minimising further cases of coronavirus.
Epidemiologists have been using traditional contact tracing for years to control sexually transmitted infections, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and meningitis. The basic principle of how an infectious disease spreads is that one individual, person A, will pass on the disease to person B, who then passes it on to C, continuing in a chain to D, E, F and onwards. Epidemiologists interrupt these chains of transmission by identifying people through contact tracing before they spread the infection to others.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/15/epidemiologists-contact-tracing-coronavirus (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/15/epidemiologists-contact-tracing-coronavirus)
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The UK NHS Test and Trace provides training for suitable candidates who wish to work in contact tracing and there is also the Johns Hopkins contact tracing course, which is recommended to people who haven't previously done contact tracing. It goes into the underlying principles and obviously you'd have to be mindful of administrative differences from the UK system, but it is worth going through if you are interested in the subject.
link is to an official university-accredited and widely recommended course, used by contact tracers across the USA and elsewhere
https://www.coursera.org/learn/covid-19-contact-tracing