For States Wanting to Reopen Their Economies, Test-And-Trace Programs May Be the Key

infected and their close contacts. Emma Court, health reporter at Bloomberg News, joins us for how technology will play a major role. Thanks for joining us, Emma, thanks for having me so as we keep eyeing a way to get back, a way to get the economy reopen. There's a lot of states that are preparing test and trace programs so

they can reopen their economies. And basically, I know we've been talking about testing for so long now, but we still need to ramp up the testing and then follow through tracking these cases, seeing where those people that turn out positive, where they were, who they came in contact with. All of this is in an effort to be able to reopen our economies again. Emma tell us how this works.

There's few states that are kind of on the front lines of trying to think of some next steps in terms of getting beyond sort of the current testing and kind of disease crisis and looking at more preventative approaches to making sure that we kind of tamped down that

curve of COVID cases. So a few states that we looked at in our story were Utah, Massachusetts, and North Dakota, and we saw in Utah and Massachusetts in particular, there was a real focus on not just kind of expanding testing capabilities, which you know, as many people may know, it's been a real problem. I'm not just kind of getting people tested, but getting them tested promptly enough that it matters for them in terms of kind of dictating how they behave in society, right, but also kind of

looking at this sort of test in trace model. So once someone gets sick and they've been confirmed to have COVID nineteen, really making sure that you look at all of the possible ways they could have potentially spread this infection in the community, reaching out to people they were in touch with, and really following up. So if let's say I had contact with an infective person at my

grocery store a week ago. I ran into this person and said hi, and they remember that interaction and recount it to someone with this public health department, then falling up with me and saying, hey, you may have been in contact with someone who had COVID, and following up

and saying how are you feeling? Do you have symptoms, and not just following up that day, but really throughout time to make sure that you're really being comprehensive about your approach, saying you know, you should probably self isolate as a precaution, things like that. So this is, as you might imagine, work that is really really resourced intensive.

So we're talking about I mean, in Massachusetts they want to hire about a thousand people you talk folk about twelve hundred state employees and had them go over to kind of local health departments to help out with this work. But you know, it's possible to take a lot more

people than that. And I spoke with someone Partners and Help, which is a group working with Massachusetts on this initiative, and you know, the chief medical officer there said she wouldn't be mad if they had forty or fifty thousand people doing this work. And I think there's some really interesting ideas there too, in terms of unemployment being such a huge problem these days. I think there's some interesting questions about can we get people back to work in

a way that also resolves this crisis. I think it's an interesting idea. It definitely is. The only flip side of that would be once things start calming down, what do you do with all these people when you don't need to keep doing that amount of tracking. But obviously, you know, who knows we might have to keep doing this for some time to come. The other angle on this is the technological angle. There's some apps that are sprouting up so you can kind of be tracked on

the app. I know some people would have a problem with being tracked in that way, but that's another part of this as well, this contact tracing. And I think there's some really interesting applications of technology here. We've seen that happen in other countries as well. Obviously, you know, there are different culture, role and political norms here in the US that you have to consider. But what we saw in North Dakota was they took this app that they had been using to sort of you know, it's

called the Bison tracker and they used it. They were going to their championship football game in Texas and it was a way for fans to kind of track their progress on this long drive over to Texas, and they said, this might be helpful for tracking COVID cases. So it's a way that people can opt in to using this app.

They can basically track their movements and then you know, as they turn out to be sick, they can actually if they want to use that information in conjunction with the public health officials and try to kind of get in touch with people they've maybe potentially been in contact with along their time and things like that. And I always love a good detail about a bison tracking app kind of being repurposed for public health, right, kind of cool.

They renamed it, by the way, Yeah, they renamed it to Care nineteen and reportedly they had more than ten thousand downloads in the first thirty six hours. So I mean, that's great that people want to get in on that, But it is very much an opt in type of situation when you're working even with hiring people to do like the tedious and time intensive work manually in making

phone calls and doing on that. Even on that front, it's up to the person individually to follow the rules there on the other side as well, right, But I do think what's interesting about it is we're seeing people feeling, like I've touch on ends about kind of this crisis, feeling like all they can really do is stay at home, you know, for those who are lucky enough to stay at home, and this provides a way to sort of

be actively involved in this public health crisis. I also think it's worth noting that we've seen some of the big tech companies team up pretty recently and say we want to do this kind of work as well, and they may have a bigger reach. I think the effort that they are collaborating on could reach like, I think

a third of the population or something like that. So there are sort of some bigger kind of tools that might be able to be useful in this in this yeh on that for an, Apple and Google announce that they're trying to build software that they can put into the Android and I phones that would help people attract these encounters. And I think even in California, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he wants to incorporate some type of smartphone contact tracing as part of his strategy to lift

these statewide stay at home orders. So this is gonna be something you're gonna hear about a little bit more in the coming weeks, just as states and cities are really desperate right now to get things back open and pumping in again. So everybody's looking at a lot of different avenues. Antibody testing was another thing that we're hearing a lot about. These are all different things that we're looking at to try and track this so that people can stay away from hot spots or help avoid creating

new hotspots. And I think there are like a few important caveats those kind of work. So, for one, what we're talking about is really preventative strategies. They may not translate in the exact same ways to areas that have really known widespread hotspots. So I'm thinking of places like New York or Seattle may have a different pass forward than some places that have been sort of somewhat left hard hit as far as we know based on the

numbers coming out of those play says. I think it's also important to consider sort of the fact that testing has been a real bottleneck and even these ambitious plans coming out of these states, we may not see that, at least initially, and you know, hopefully in the long run overcome some of these ball next. So you know, I talked to the broad in Massachusetts. They took a lab that had been doing n A testing work and they repurposed it to do COVID nineteen testing kind of

in March. And you know, I think what's really interesting, And I talked about lab director there Is. I said, you know, but you guys want to expand so much. You're doing two thousand tests a day, you want to do ten thousand. What's the barrier to getting there? And she said, you know, we don't have enough of these supplies.

And she was hopeful that they would, by the way, but I think that's something we've seen for weeks now, for some time now, really be a problem if you don't have enough swabs to take people, simple as you can't do enough testing. And I think that's a really important challenge that you shouldn't underestimate. Am a court health reporter at Bloomberg News. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been

your daily coronavirus update. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.