Louisiana contact tracing stymied as 73 percent of people who answer don’t share contacts – By Andrea Gallo (NOLA) / Aug 1 2020
When Louisiana began to open back up again after a hard lockdown this spring, Gov. John Bel Edwards touted two key antidotes to ensuring coronavirus did not spin out of control again: testing and contact tracing.
Things haven’t gone according to plan.
Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles and several other cities are struggling to contain the virus. Hospital intensive care units are overwhelmed. School leaders don’t know whether they should open classrooms in the fall. And Louisiana has the highest per-capita rate of known coronavirus cases in the nation.
Contact tracers are supposed to speak with infected people as soon as they test positive, find out who they’ve been in contact with, and warn those people to self-quarantine. But that’s proved easier said than done: Early concerns about whether people would be unwilling to talk to contact tracers have been just one obstacle. Now, delays in test results are making it nearly impossible for contact tracers to do their work effectively.
Continue to article: https://www.nola.com/news/healthcare_hospitals/article_e131af56-d377-11ea-bfe0-7bf39e6fe07a.html
