Uncle Sam Wants You! Now’s The Time for the Contact Tracer Force

Uncle Sam Wants You!

We’ve Got the Space Force. Now’s The Time for the Contact Tracer Force!

by

Jac Charlier and Jon Ross

May 2020

After months of news about COVID-19 and weeks of radical changes to our lives, we are faced with the reality that this pandemic will affect our lives for many months – maybe years – to come.

While researchers work to identify ways to prevent and treat the virus, until those vaccines and treatments are safe and widely available, containing COVID-19 will rely on expanded testing combined with the public health “detective work” of contact tracing, the process of identifying those with the virus and tracking everyone they encounter, allowing us to, as Governor Pritzker said last week, “reduce our spread rate, speed up our diagnoses, and seek to halt outbreaks before they happen.”

As the Chicago Tribune reported May 3 (“The Two Sides of Contact Tracing”), however, our local governments are limited – in terms of money and labor – to adequately do the job required. Perhaps, as the article implies, a local solution – or 50 state solutions, as we have now for responding to the virus – might not be optimal to deliver the public health response we need.

Illinois needs as many as 3800 contact tracers, a small army unto itself. But, for a nation of our size and population, why shouldn’t contact tracing be treated as a truly national initiative – consistent with the borderless spread of the virus?

That is why, consistent with the gravity of this call to duty, we propose the creation of a new arm of the US Public Health Service (USPHS), the part of our military that leads the way into our battles against disease. These contract tracers (call them the Contact Tracer Force, like the recently created Space Force) will be trained and mobilized to respond regionally or locally in cooperation with state and local public health officials.

Contract tracing will make a clear contribution to our nation’s collective public health, so it must be done in a way that reflects a call to service comparable to that of joining the military, Peace Corps, or VISTA. It’s important work performed by dedicated Americans with a sense of purpose as first responders for this pandemic (and other public health crises). As professionals, they would be compensated appropriately, like others in public service doing vital national tasks. They will execute a national response strategy that gives them flexibility to move to hotspots against a virus that advances unrelentingly against those not properly equipped to meet it. We are one nation; and this work should be done by Americans for Americans – not by apps but supported by technology. And this is no part-time or temporary job – as the contact tracers who have fought HIV/AIDS for decades are well aware.[i]

The creation of this force is eminently possible – and necessary – because with tens of millions out of work, a required workforce can easily be recruited, and every reason why these patriotic individuals can become part of a larger infrastructure of public health professionals who can help coordinate and carry out responses to public health challenges for years to come. And it will put our fellow Illinoisans and Americans back to work, supporting their families and communities with good jobs.

Moreover, this public health national service effort can be done in ways most responsive – economically and socially – to each community’s population, making important social contributions as a result and paying it forward for millions left behind due to inequities associated with race, income, geography, and gender.

COVID-19 to date has disproportionately affected poorer, vulnerable Americans: African-Americans, Latinos, the elderly, Native communities, and lower-income rural communities, among others; here in Chicago, we have seen its disproportionate effects. Contact tracing needs to reach these remote or hard-to-access communities in a way that is culturally competent –employing citizens from those communities as contract tracers and who can effectively reach out to their neighbors to help prevent spread of the disease and further the community solidarity social distancing has affected.

We already know of contact tracing best practices generated from our experience with pandemics like Ebola and SARS. But nothing comes close to what we face today, with more than a million COVID-19 cases and counting in the US alone and millions likely to come. If addressed with an eye toward meeting immediate and longer-term goals of public health, economics, and equity, when the call goes out that ‘Uncle Sam Wants You,’ we should expect to see the longest lines yet of this pandemic for what would be the start of a critical and enduring mission.

Jac Charlier is civic leader from Chicago’s Northwest side and a national crime reduction expert who works with the public health sector on addressing drug use and mental health challenges of vulnerable populations.

Jon Ross, PhD teaches public health and public policy at Adler University and The Chicago School.

[i] Centers for Disease Control/National Coalition of STD Directors (2016/2019). Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Contact Tracing. http://www.ncsddc.org/wp-conte...