Aside from mass testing, one of the most important methods to curb the transmission of the novel coronavirus is through extensive contact tracing. Now there's an opportunity to become a contact tracer as the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has launched a six-hour online course.
The online class offers online instruction to those who want to learn the basics of contact tracing, which is vital in the world's battle against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The novel coronavirus, now called the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has now spread across 187 countries and territories, infecting more than 4.25 million people.
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Training for free
The new course, which is now open to enrollment, aims to train contact tracers. Contact tracing is a robust public health strategy that is essential in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Anyone can join the course. Those who complete and pass the online course may be hired by New York to help fight the global pandemic.
The course rolled out on May 11, and within just hours, there were more than 400 people who registered. The class lasts for a week, with one-hour sessions every day. At the end of the course, the enrollee needs to finish a graded final exam to determine how well they understood the training and lesson.
The contact tracing course has five sections or modules that cover all the needed information and training. It contains modules for necessary information on the virus, including the signs and symptoms and how it spreads, the basics of contact tracing, including how to define a case and identify the patient's contacts, and steps involved in investigating cases. The other two modules include the ethics of contact tracing and the skills for effective communication in the tracing process.
Taught by Emily Gurley, an associate scientist, and expert at Johns Hopkins, the course will cover COVID-19 and all the required information on how to become a contact tracer. This includes knowing how to build rapport with the infected person and their contacts.
Contact tracing
A reliable contact tracing program is the key to reopening a country after being locked down during the coronavirus pandemic. It has been long used in public health, which aims to teach the basics of interviewing those who tested positive with the virus.
It is essential to identify the close contacts of the patients who might have been exposed and where the patient went over the past two weeks. Stopping the infection from spreading from the patient and his or her close contacts will help contain the virus.
"Even if you stop one or two new infections, you're preventing many new cases down the line," Emily Gurley, a Johns Hopkins infectious disease epidemiologist and the lead instructor of the course, said.
Contact tracers should inform the contacts right away that they have been exposed to the virus. This way, the cycle of infection stops, and the contact will not infect other people. They will need to convince all contacts to stay at home or to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Rolled out in New York
Governor Andrew Cuomo fully supports the program, along with Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg and a former mayor of New York City. The course is part of an intense program of contact tracing in New York, the hardest-hit state in the country.
The program aims to have about 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 residents in the state, aiming to have an estimated 6,400 to 17,000 tracers in the whole state.
"Contact tracing allows us to communicate with people infected with COVID-19, identify those who may have been exposed, and provide all of them with guidance to limit the spread of the disease. This new training course, which we're making available online for free, will teach contact tracers how to do this work effectively—and help cities and states across the nation undertake these critical efforts," Bloomberg said.
Mass testing and intensive contact tracing are critical to the reopening plan in New York, with a staggering 338,485 confirmed cases, the highest in the country.
"We're testing more than any other state, and now we're working with Bloomberg Philanthropies and Johns Hopkins to quickly build an army of tracers for our contact tracing program that can serve as a model for the rest of the nation," said Governor Cuomo. "This innovative online training course is a key component of our program that will provide tracers with the tools to effectively trace COVID-19 cases at the scale we need to fight this pandemic," Governor Cuomo said.
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