Texas A&M School of Public Health experts explain the effort to prevent COVID-19 from rebounding as the state reopens.
Monitoring the number of new COVID-19 cases each day and watching for sudden increases in numbers will be critical as the United States reopens its economy. Public health officials will use contact tracing to slow the spread of the coronavirus as communities begin to allow people to dine-in at restaurants, shop at stores, go to movie theaters and more.
Contact tracing involves interviewing p eople who have been sick with COVID-19 and identifying who they have been in close contact with in the previous 14 days. Contact tracers then reach out to the contacts to inform them of the potential exposure and verify whether they are experiencing any symptoms of disease.
This process helps prevent the spread of disease through encouraging testing of contacts and self-isolation, and educating them on how to prevent any further spread. From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Angela Clendenin and Rebecca Fischer from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics have worked with the Brazos County Health District to help with case interviews and contact tracing. Some of their work has helped to identify clusters where two or more cases can be tied back to a common case in the community, as well as analyze how the disease has spread in the Brazos Valley.
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