Local health agencies struggle to ramp up virus tracking

ATLANTA (AP) — As state after state begins to reopen, local health departments charged with tracking down everyone who has been in close contact with those who test positive for the new coronavirus are still scrambling to hire the number of people they need to do the job.

They are often hundreds — even thousands — of people short of targets for their contact tracing programs. Public health experts have consistently said robust programs to test more people and trace their contacts are needed for states to safely reboot their economies and prevent a resurgence of the virus.

Cook County, Illinois, has just 29 contact tracers serving 2.5 million people living in suburban communities around Chicago. Los Angeles County, which at more than 10 million people has a population slightly greater than Michigan, has just 400 of the estimated 6,000 contact tracers it will need under California’s criteria for a broader reopening.

With 2.7 million residents and roughly 100 to 300 new COVID-19 cases a day, Miami-Dade County has 175 people tracking down people who were potentially exposed to the virus.

“The whole point of the lockdown was to buy time to have a better way to keep numbers down,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the humanitarian response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa during the Obama administration. “And that’s why so many of us are screaming ourselves hoarse about testing and tracing.”

Public health experts say contact tracing systems should be in place before cases become widespread, so every new infection can be tracked and the person's contacts identified, tested and isolated from the rest of the community.

Until recently, there had been scant federal guidance on what contact tracing should look like, and there is still no coordinated federal...