Editorial: Never too late for covid investigation tools
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The state of Pennsylvania announced Monday a new “digital case investigation tool” is launching. The tool will let state residents between 19 and 64 years old who live in counties that don’t have county or local health departments help trace covid-19 contacts.
It’s a good development. If the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being distributed are a sword in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, contact tracing is the shield.
Untangling the knots of contact and infection is how Typhoid Mary was discovered in 1907. It’s how a cholera outbreak in 1854 London was followed back to its source — one particular water pump with an unclean handle. Following breadcrumbs works for more than just fairy tales.
But while not being ungrateful, it’s also possible to ask: Why has this taken so long?
Let’s look at those vaccines again. Two different vaccines were engineered in less than a year — a remarkably short time frame for the kind of project that frequently is measured in years instead of months.
But an online form is coming out a week after the first vaccine. Did a website really take longer to build than a delivery device for a spike protein that will use messenger RNA to trick the human body into fighting a novel virus?
It definitely didn’t. A Carnegie Mellon University professor built a contact tracing app back in April. The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Internet Privacy Research Institute created the Covid Alert PA app the state implemented in September and is encouraging Pennsylvanians to download. The new tool will work in concert with existing processes like the app.
“Launching this tool allows public health professionals to connect with more Pennsylvanians in record time to learn where people went and who they were in close contact with while infectious, in order to further protect loved ones and neighbors across the commonwealth,” Secretary of Health Rachel Levine said in a statement.
Makes sense. It also would have made sense back in April when the state wasn’t prioritizing contact tracing and Levine told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that with 20,000 cases, the state couldn’t do tracing at the time.
Today, Pennsyvania has more than 560,000 cases. Allegheny County has logged more than 47,000 positive cases, and Westmoreland County has almost 17,000.
To be fair, the state stepped up hiring of contact tracers over the summer. Yet this online form seems like an obvious step, like putting a Band-Aid on a cut.
But a bandage is still welcome even if the cut already has been stitched closed. So maybe it’s not time to say “better late than never.” More like “better eventually than never.”