KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With COVID-19 spreading like wildfire, it's all hands on deck situation at health departments across the Kansas City area.
"When you’re getting 40, 50, 60 cases reported in one day, it is challenging," Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, Chief Epidemiologist Elizabeth Groenweghe said.
Public health agencies across the Kansas City region are responsible for tracing outbreak and tracking down individuals who may have been exposed to possible infection.
"We’ve seen such an increase that the need has become much more urgent for us to bring in additional staff," Elizabeth Holzschuh, an epidemiologist for the Johnson County Department of Health and Environment, said.
In many jurisdictions, epidemiologists are the "disease investigators" who gather the travel history of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
A second group, the so-called "contact tracers," then go to work.
They are "responsible for calling all of those individuals, interviewing them and asking them some very straightforward questions, making sure that they’re not currently symptomatic," Holzschuh said.
To adequately handle the influx of cases, the Johnson County health department has relied on school nurses for the last six weeks as volunteer "contact tracers," but there's been a new hurdle in recent weeks.
"During the stay-at-home orders, individuals weren’t going out, they weren’t socializing, so their list of contacts or where they had been was very limited to mostly just the household," Holzschuh said. "But now as we reopen our communities and people are going out more, we're identifying more contacts, more places they could’ve been spreading the virus."
Area health departments are actively hiring more contact tracers. Wyandotte County has started using pharmacy and medical students to help with the increase in cases.
"Because we never saw a real noticeable and appreciable decrease in the number of cases that we've received, this is a continuation of the activity that we’ve been seeing since April," Groenweghe said.
Without a vaccine and with social-distancing fatigue setting in for many, there's a serious concern what the amount of cases will look like a month from now.
"It’s kind of in tradition to have parties, barbecues, get-togethers on the Fourth of July weekend," Groenweghe said. "We would really discourage that kind of activity if possible to help prevent spread of COVID."
