Critics say the failing stems from a lack of direction from the Trump administration, which has left reopening decisions to states and released guidance on contact tracing weeks after state efforts were launched. That’s left sizable state-to-state disparities in readiness.
“President Trump’s refusal to focus on testing and contact tracing and the general absence of any leadership led to disastrous failures in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement to POLITICO.
Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Trump administration to quickly distribute $8 billion Congress approved weeks ago to fortify contact tracing programs. While the administration has already released $11 billion for state testing and tracing, Democrats say further delay on the remaining funds has left states inadequately prepared to deal with new spikes in infections.
Reports from the front lines bear that out.
Jennifer Kertanis, the director of the Farmington Valley Health District in Canton, Conn., told POLITICO her department only received $40,000 in federal aid and was told that would have to do until next March.
“We’ve already pretty much spent all of that money on equipment to allow staff to work safely from home and on overtime,” she said. “We have not had the money to hire anybody. We’ve been training the existing staff that we have had and shuffling duties around. We’ve been using pen and paper and Excel spreadsheets because we’ve never had the resources to invest.”
Lawmakers in the Black, Hispanic and Asian Pacific American caucuses last week grilled Redfield over the lack of federal leadership on contact tracing. He said the CDC is currently reviewing plans states developed. But several lawmakers pointed out that states were already using these plans and that assistance from the agency is too little, too late.
Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) told POLITICO she found the information “really worrisome.”
“Are they really leaving it up to the states to have a contact tracer plan? Who’s going to enforce a contact tracer plan?” she said. “As we know, the states vary so much in terms of whether they take COVID-19 seriously.”
The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment and did not say when the agency will give feedback on states’ plans.
Despite ongoing challenges with funding, logistics and federal support, some states have built successful programs.
Hawaii, which is now seeing only a handful of new infections, increased its contact tracing staff in the last month from around 80 to more than 300 — and more than 1,400 have signed up to be trained if needed.
Gov. David Ige told POLITICO that the state, learning from past outbreaks including SARS, has been able to track every positive case so far, and that the vast majority of individuals have been willing to share information about their contacts.
“People don’t want to get their friends and neighbors sick,” he said.
Oregon also has a robust program that is currently contacting more than 90 percent of new infections within 24 hours.
But elsewhere, officials are still putting together their tracing programs months after stay-at-home orders were lifted — and training new hires as spikes threaten to overwhelm local health systems. Even those states that have hired hundreds or thousands of people have struggled to find new infections quickly and elicit useful information.
In New York City, which opened restaurants on Monday, contact tracers last week received phone numbers for about 85 percent of newly infected people, but less than half of those people provided information on their recent contacts.
New Jersey, one of the hardest hit states, has brought on almost no new contact tracers since the pandemic began. The state has roughly 900 and needs somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday. The state’s digital platform to track the program is only running in two counties, so statewide data on how successful the program has been so far is not yet available.
Houston, the latest epicenter, is still working to hire and train 150 contact tracers by July 1.