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Contact Tracing Lacking as COVID-19 Runs Rampant Through Iowa
DES MOINES, Iowa — In a press conference Thursday, Gov. Kim Reynolds said the Iowa Department of Public Health has added contact tracers and will be hiring more.
“What contact tracing does is let’s say you test positive for COVID-19. I am going to ask you who you all have been around. What I need is a list of those contacts to put them possibly in quarantine. So we’re really looking at who could have possibly been exposed to COVID-19,” said Nola Aigner Davis, Polk County Health Department’s public health communications officer.
But with community spread of the virus throughout the state, contact tracers are having a hard time keeping up, and some Iowans who have tested positive are not getting a call.
“If you haven’t received a call, please note that we in the community are incredibly inundated. The state and the county are seeing numbers like we’ve never seen before. COVID-19 is running rampant through our state and our county. So please give public health, both state and local, a little bit of time. Sometimes you may get the test results faster than we do,” Aigner Davis said.
One Des Moines woman said she got a call from the Iowa Department of Public Health, but they didn’t say anything about contact tracing.
“It was basically like, ‘Hey, your son tested positive. Quarantine for ten days.’ There wasn’t anything else that we needed to do. And I was like, ‘Well, he’s been around some people. Shouldn’t we do something about that?’ And I got no information on that, so I just started reaching out to the people that I knew that we had been around in the last few weeks and inform them that he had had a positive result,” Des Moines resident Jessica Williams said.
Levi Richey, in Ames, had a different experience, but he was contacted by the Story County Health Department after his roommate tested positive.
“I think that contact tracing really does help because then they can start calling more people asking if they’re having symptoms. It really would stop the spread of it. Even if you don’t have any symptoms, like asymptomatic, you still can have COVID because I feel like I was asymptomatic for a while and just didn’t know it,” Richey said.
Some county health departments, like Story County, are running their own contact tracing. But others, like Polk County, are relying on the Iowa Department of Public Health to do that job.
“The state is doing that for Polk County. Polk County is working with the schools to help contact trace. Anyone 18 and younger, we do contact tracing as well as staff in schools,” Aigner Davis said.
WHO 13 contacted the Iowa Department of Public Health about how many people are working full time doing contact tracing and how many counties the Iowa Department of Public Health is contact tracing for, but they have not responded.
