Health experts call for Roosevelt-style programs to kill virus, revive economy – By Reid Wilson (The Hill) / April 6 2020
A first-of-its-kind program that will deploy almost a thousand people across Massachusetts may be a small-scale test of what public health experts hope could eventually stamp out the coronavirus even before a vaccine becomes widely available.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) said Friday that his state would join with Partners In Health, a Boston-based global health nonprofit, to turn staffers into contact tracers, the backbone of any robust public health effort to squelch a deadly disease.
Those contact tracers will interview people who have come down with the coronavirus to determine who around them might also have been exposed. Those who may have been exposed will be warned to watch for symptoms themselves, giving public health officials a window into how the coronavirus is spreading and who might next be at risk.
“Massachusetts is the only state in the nation implementing this type of programming, and this collaborative tracing initiative will break new ground as we work together to slow the spread of COVID-19,” Baker said in a statement Friday.
Public health experts across the country hope Massachusetts will not be alone for long. Increasingly, those who have warned for months about the virus’s potential spread now say a mass-scale national program aimed at suppressing the virus at a community level through that sort of robust contact tracing is crucial to stopping its spread.
Such a program aimed at bolstering national public health would be unprecedented in the history of the country. But as the economy nosedives into what could be a depression and millions lose their jobs in the space of a few days and weeks, a government-backed effort to get those people back to work does have a precedent, in Depression-era programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps.
In their brief histories, the WPA and the CCC employed nearly one in ten Americans, giving people a paycheck in the years between Franklin Roosevelt’s election and the outset of World War II. In its first year, the WPA accounted for more than 6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product — the equivalent of about $1.3 trillion in today’s dollars.
Continue to article: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/491269-health-experts-call-for-roosevelt-style-programs-to-kill-virus-revive
