Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials Release a National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the US

April 10, 2020 – The Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and its partner, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), have released a new report: “A National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the US.”

The report outlines key next steps in the battle against COVID-19:

• The United States must implement a robust and comprehensive system to identify all COVID-19 cases and trace all close contacts of each identified case.
• This system is necessary in order to save lives, reduce COVID-19’s burden on our healthcare system, ease strict social distancing measures, and confidently make progress toward returning to work and school.
• The American public health workforce will need approximately 100,000 (paid or volunteer) contact tracers to assist with this large-scale effort, to trace all contacts, safely isolate the sick, and quarantine those exposed.
• This workforce could be strategically deployed to areas of greatest need and managed through state and local public health agencies that are on the front lines of COVID-19 response.
• To do this, it is estimated that Congress will need to appropriate approximately $3.6 billion in emergency funding to state and territorial health departments.

You can read the report here.