Meet BU’s COVID-19 Contact Tracing Team
(12/4/2020, The Brink)
One of the many new terms that has entered the average American’s vocabulary since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is “contact tracing.” While quick to the lips of many public health experts, what contact tracing actually is, and why it plays a critical role in stemming the tide of disease transmission, warrants an explanation for the rest of us.
“Contact tracing is not new,” says Hannah Emily Landsberg (Sargent’12, SPH’13), director of case management and contact tracing for Boston University Healthway, “but a lot of people are hearing about it for the first time.”
Contact tracing involves tracking down anyone who might have been exposed to an infectious disease through close contact with someone infected. The goal is to identify exposed people as soon as possible and to get them into quarantine before they potentially become infectious themselves, thereby stemming the spread of the disease within a population. Since BU’s campus-wide coronavirus surveillance program got underway in July, routine screening of the BU community has helped identify positive coronavirus cases early. After a positive result, it’s a race against time for BU’s contact tracing team to figure out who else might have been infected.
