Amid coronavirus surge, Texas has a contact tracing problem: reporting cases by fax
Manual, archaic technology and people's mistrust of government agencies are blunting contact tracing efforts, even as the persistent rise in coronavirus cases forces several Western and Southern states to dial back their reopening plans. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, raised a question Friday as to whether contact tracing is even worth the endeavor. And in Texas, a health official in Austin revealed this week that information about hundreds of new cases is pouring in daily across the state via an archaic form of technology: the fax machine. That has made the confirmation of positive cases extremely time-consuming, the official said, which in turn has hindered contact tracing, a labor-intensive commitment that involves calling people who are confirmed ill with COVID-19, asking for their recent contacts and reaching out to those people to determine if they need testing and if they should self-isolate, all in the hopes of breaking the chains of infection. 'The cases we receive come in by fax machine,' Dr. Mark Escott, the interim medical director and health authority for Austin Public Health, told Travis County commissioners. 'And sometimes those faxes are positives and sometimes they're negatives. Sometimes they have information like the person's phone number that was tested and sometimes they don't. So we have a whole team of people who have to sort through more than a thousand faxes a day to sort out the positives versus the negatives.'
NBC News - June 26, 2020View the full story here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amid-coronavirus-surge-texas-has-contact-tracing-problem-reporting-cases-n1232212