The Important Role of Contact Tracing and Keeping the Curve Flat

Physicians have used contact tracing for years to diagnose potential transmission of illnesses, including well-known illnesses such as HIV. The disparity between such disease-related contact tracing attempts and COVID-19 is merely a scale. This may be the first-time healthcare professionals, and support personnel have attempted to adapt this approach to such a large, infected community (Elflein, 2020). Contact tracing is a tool that helps medical practitioners or other certified employees to assess who has been subjected to disease and with whom they have come into direct contact. It is crucial for managing an epidemic because it helps people to take protective precautions towards harming anyone and, if possible, to get adequate care.

The first and most successful step in containing an epidemic is known to be contact tracing since tools for mass testing and vast amounts of vaccines are improbable to be available immediately for use. Efficient tracing of communications will allow populations to restart from lock-down even before vaccines are available. As the world begins to fight the COVID-19 epidemic, one thunderous agreement among health practitioners and institutions is that societies and nations ought to work closely and try and flatten the curve (McCarthy, 2020). It applies to the bell-shaped curve commonly taken by diseases and the desire to reduce the curve’s height to ensure that health systems are not overwhelmed while they attempt to deliver quality care. Contact tracing is a crucial technique for achieving this. As council members look at the pandemic from a financial point of view, touch tracing is known to be the fourth of five primary fields required to revive the economy. The remaining four are reducing the infection rate, maintaining sufficient treatment capability, ensuring that we can rapidly monitor for potential diseases, and continuing education and advice from the public. With little or inadequate contact tracing, efficient contact tracing will lead to company reopening and expanded economic growth sooner than would be wise. That also suggests that policymakers should have a better idea of whether their territory is an epidemic hotspot to balance economic risks against the disease or loss of life threat and decide how long particular health directives can be applied.  

Contact-tracing’s primary prevention purpose is to locate and separate first-order relations to avoid them from infecting anyone. The transmission reduction effect of contact tracing is based on the number of second-order infections produced by each infectious interaction. Transmission by first-order contacts is not the only transmission method that leads to viral spread: the case may have been transmitted pre-symptomatically, and second or subsequent order contacts may have been communicated. Our goal is to provide a heuristic device to examine the immediate infections avoided by first-order contact tracing and exclusion, rather than providing a wholly elaborated model. Overwhelmingly, contact tracking has been done by verbally asking an affected person by an accredited agent of a public health department to inform them who they may have been in physical contact with for a given period. Typically, the people listed as possible contacts will not recognize that they are appointed by the patient or have the option of opting-in or sign up-out of the procedure when their data is submitted for the follow-up to the health care organization. There is an increased emphasis on ensuring that both the sick person and their future partners’ safety is protected, while public health departments explore implementing technical means to perform similar tasks.

Although the effects of contact tracing on individual privacy can and should be addressed by policymakers, it is necessary to remember that public health departments need little details to perform contact tracing (Ho, et al., 2020). This knowledge is mostly restricted to the name of the contact and a convenient way to reach them for follow-up. The much more important part of contact tracing is to get as soon as possible this vague description to the contact tracers so that the tracer can alert the targets of the patient of their future exposure. In comparison, this helps the patient’s associates to make conscious choices for their welfare and avoid spreading everyone. Person privacy issues should be weighed against the firm and apparent need to slow down disseminating through our societies of a highly communicable disease. Since a person experiencing no specific symptoms will spread COVID-19, the effects of delay can be disastrous. Before they can transmit the virus anymore, contact tracers have a minimal window of time to contact people. For an unintentional vector to infect even others, all it takes is one ride to a shopping store. It suggests that public health departments should be using all appropriate, responsibly developed resources at their disposal to quickly identify the contacts of a patient and collect the best possible information to access those people.

To conclude, the role of contact tracing is about getting as many people as safe as possible when it comes to it and avoiding or mitigating the further transmission of the virus. Without tossing anonymity out of the door, this should be done and in such a manner that the information obtained should help municipal councils make essential choices on opening them up. We will both work together to flatten the curve once again and keep it that way, with the best software and the right strategy.

References:

• Elflein, J. (2020). Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Canada – Statistics & Facts.
• McCarthy, N. (2020). South Korea’s Successful Battle to Flatten the Curve.
• McDonald, J. (2020). The Role of Contact Tracing in Keeping the Curve Flat.
• Ho, Yu-Chen, et al. (2020). Social Distancing 2.0 with Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing to Avoid a Second Wave of COVID-19. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.16611