The United States has more than 50,000 contact tracers for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic hit, according to a survey of states conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in collaboration with NPR.
The total number of contact tracers reported in all U.S. states and territories was 53,116. That’s four times the number of contact tracers states reported to NPR in its initial survey in late April, but still falls far short of the more than 100,000 public health experts have been calling for since the pandemic began, seven months ago.
“I see us inching up in terms of increasing the contact tracing personnel, [though] still only really halfway to where we need to be,” says Danielle Allen, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and a co-author of a handbook of COVID-19 policy. This latest survey shows a nearly 30% increase from NPR’s last survey in early August, which found 41,122 contact tracers across the country, but some of that increase is due to the fact that more states are now included.
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