Many people find it hard to believe when I tell them that self-directed contact tracing could stop the spread of the coronavirus within a week. It took China over a month and 40,000 healthcare workers to conduct their contact tracing and quarantine all infected or exposed people within and around the city of Wuhan (1).
The rest of the world has been reeling with the virus for ten weeks, and have only recently flattened the curve after locking down entire countries. So, how could we stop the spread of COVID-19 within a week?
The main reason I believe this could happen is that self-directed contact tracing depends chiefly upon communication. The week’s time frame does depend on world leaders embracing and communicating the concept quickly and widely. Once that occurs, individuals could easily make the calls to their few friends, family, and colleagues they had been in contact with over the previous two weeks. Those calls can readily happen among a thousand persons, a million, or tens of millions since individuals are making the calls. All they need are instructions, similar to the washing your hands, social distancing, and other directions we received from leaders and health organizations over the past couple of months to help reduce the spread of the virus.
The only bottleneck is the volume of calls that could deluge clinics and doctor offices to confirm symptoms. Of course, this log jam is a relatively easy logistics problem. Similar to school and college orientations, the first communication of this concept could assign specific call hours based on the first initial of the last name to manage the queuing obstacle.
I am not saying the pandemic will be over, and there will be zero new cases of the coronavirus within a week. Even in China’s case, they continue to experience new cases today. The primary goal of contact tracing is to identify and quarantine all infected or exposed to stop the spread and to get healthy people back to work. That is what should happen within a week of announcing self-directed contact tracing to the world.
Since most of the world has flattened the curve, it is hard to forecast how low cases could go during that first week of self-directed contact tracing. Countries are also cautiously opening their economies now, so one would expect some gradual growth as people interact more. Last, it could take a couple of weeks before we see count reductions since some quarantined exposed folks will exhibit the disease. Do you have any suggestions on how we could easily tally the number of home-bound heroes?
Take care and be safe!
Jeff
#SimpleCoronavirusSolution #selfDirectedContactTracing #InOneWeek
SOURCE (1) “Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19),” (World Health Organization, 24 February 2020). <https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf>.