Nine days after Santa Clara County officials announced they had hired only 50 contact tracers, the number has nearly doubled, with 96 on the job as of Thursday.
The hirings represent progress, but the Santa Clara County Public Health Department is nowhere close to having the workforce of 700 contact tracers it had anticipated to hire by the last week of May.
“It’s turned out to be a lot harder than I expected,” county CEO Jeff Smith said last week.
In a virtual meeting for the county’s health and hospital committee held Thursday, Santa Clara County supervisors Joe Simitian and Susan Ellenberg pressed assistant health officer Sarah Rudman and Evelyn Ho, the county’s contact tracing expansion lead, on plans to expand contact tracing efforts.
“We are in an unusual position in terms of ramping up 1,000 employees,” Simitian said. “I think I can make Supervisor Ellenberg smile if I say how long it usually takes us to hire two people for important positions in the county.”
Despite falling well short of initial goals for a contact tracing workforce laid out in early May, Ho and Rudman said the county is training nearly twice as many tracers as are currently on the job and that there should be 180 working for the county on Monday.
Ho said the county still anticipates it will have 1,000 contact tracers in place by the middle of July, as 220 county employees have been identified to be reassigned to contact tracing and will begin training on Monday.
After Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state would deploy 10,000 workers to serve as contact tracers throughout California, Ho said Santa Clara County requested 500 workers, which is proportional for the county’s population.
Santa Clara County has prioritized the expansion of contact tracing through identifying county and state workers who have relevant skills to begin working sooner, but the county has also received more than 3,000 volunteer applications. Of that group, nearly one-third have been identified as people who can commit to working 32-hour weeks for the next six months.
“Out of the 962 who have completed the second step, they have signed some agreements, they have certified to become disaster service workers,” Ho said.
Contact tracing for COVID-19 requires finding close contacts of individuals who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus and encouraging them to quarantine. Experts including George Rutherford, a UCSF epidemiologist who oversees San Francisco’s contact tracing program, and Lorene Nelson, an associate professor of epidemiology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, joined the meeting Thursday to detail the importance of contact tracing.
Rutherford said countries such as Australia and New Zealand have the most effective contact tracing methods in place, but indicated surveillance methods may not pass muster in the United States and noted the work done in the Bay Area is serving as an example for the rest of the country.
“We’re doing it well in the Bay Area frankly and everybody is looking at us to how to do it,” Rutherford said. “I get contacted daily by other states who want all of our stuff and all of our training materials.”
Contact tracers ask people who have tested positive for COVID-19 questions about where they’ve spent time, who they’ve spent time with and what they will need to quarantine for 14 days. They also contact the close contacts of a person who has tested positive to notify them and encourage them to quarantine.
Ensuring contract tracers — and particularly volunteers — are culturally competent and fit to represent the county is a concern expressed by both Simitian and Ellenberg.
“I just think we need to be very clear that the vetting process has to be thorough enough that we don’t have new hires, quick hires in the system who are inappropriate for dealing with the public,” Simitian said. “By virtue of criminal background or any other misconduct that should send up a red flag.”
Ho and Rudman assured the Supervisors the county was going to great lengths to complete background checks and properly train all contact tracers. To prepare the workforce, the county has partnered with Heluna Health, a non-profit organization responsible for training contact tracers.
“We have an extensive period during which one of the more expert folks will actually listen in with them or work with them during their first calls to ensure that not only have they completed the training, but they meet all the qualifications and under observation they’re providing both the high-quality services and representing the county with exactly what we would want a county employee to put forward,” Rudman said.
Ho said Heluna will continue to vet volunteers during the training process and will offer skills and knowledge assessments before candidates are approved to begin contact tracing.
According to Ho, the average number of close contacts per positive test is around four in the county.
