Contact tracing can help stop a pandemic
To the editor:
Contact tracing for a DIY pandemic: keep a list of where you went and who you meet today.
That’s it.
That’s how you trace a pandemic. You and your kids can do this from home!
If your state throws caution to the wind to reopen you will need a 14 day list of who you contacted every day and where you went to verify or notify of an infection.
If those you met on a given day get sick/die you’ll want to see from your dated list if you were in proximity while they were infecting everyone around them.
If you can verify you were not, you may not need to quarantine.
If you yourself get sick, the health department will want to notify all the people you infected. That’s when you give up your list for notifying and they start contacting the people you met.
Practice by using a travel log, daily diary; start today. Your memory will be less fuzzy now than when you are sporting a temperature over 102. It’s simple — who did you see today?
For more information check the info on “contact tracing” on the CDC corona virus 19 website: cdc.gov.
Why DIY? Because you can.
Your county health department still hasn’t mastered testing, isn’t up to the challenge of supplying protective gear to the health workers and certainly hasn’t put contact tracing in place. It’s a safe guess the health department probably won’t have a handle on contact tracing new infections before the Republican Governor stampedes Florida to recklessly reopen the economy.
Let’s all pitch in to help our local department of health get right up on those contact traces!
Your memory is more likely to be functioning now, day by day, so let’s all start keeping track. Don’t wait till after you are infected to try to trace back over the preceding two weeks. Start your own diary today: Which public places did you go to where you may get or leave some COVID-19 contamination? Who did you talk to that day?
Hey, if the names on your daily list turn out to be disproportionately loved ones, people you don’t think of as expendable; you may also want to contact Gov. DeSantis’ online at Reopen FL comment. Offer him your wisdom on his plan to get those tattoo shops back up and running and rev up his “visit Florida” campaign spending tax money recruiting New Yorker City folks to escape the pandemic and come on down to Florida for vacation.
Ellen Starbird
Cape Coral