GOVERNOR’S BRIEFING/Thursday, 4/30

Governor Details

‘Contact Tracing’

ALBANY – Governor Cuomo Wednesday announced that New York State’s contract-tracing program, headed up by former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg, will deploy 30 “contact tracers” per 100,000 people to areas with the highest rates of infection and regions that data shows could be the first to open.

Planned in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut through the next flu season, program is expected to have 6,400 to 17,000 tracers statewide depending on the projected number of cases, working remotely using specially developed software.

It included four steps aimed at preventing COVID-19:

• One, labs will report positive cases immediately to contact tracers on a daily basis.

• Two, the contact tracer will interview the positive patient to identify people they may have been in contact with over the past 14 days.

• Three, the contact tracer will notify and interview each contact to alert them to their risk of infection and instruct those contacts to quarantine or isolate for 14 days to be sure they don’t spread COVID-19 to others.

• Four, the contact tracers will monitor those contacts by text throughout the duration of their quarantine or isolation to see if the contacts are showing any symptoms.

To meet the nation-leading scale and scope of this program, Mayor Bloomberg and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will support the State Department of Health’s initiative to build an army of contact tracers through a three-step process: recruitment, interviewing and training. Bloomberg Philanthropies will help DOH to actively identify and recruit potential contact tracers for the program from State, City and County Health Departments.

As part of this effort, The Bloomberg School – the top-rated public health school in the country – in consultation with DOH, will develop a world-class online curriculum for the State’s contact tracers that includes a training program and an online exam that must be passed to complete the program. Vital Strategies’ initiative Resolve to Save Lives will provide technical and operational advising to New York State Health Department staff.