Editorial: Tracking covid-19 spread in Pennsylvania
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It’s up to us all now.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health is not untangling the webs that tie one covid-19 infection to another anymore.
The disturbing thing is that isn’t just happening now.
“Contact tracing stopped last week, as the number of cases alone, without doing follow-up contact, became challenging to manage,” said Nate Wardle, a health department spokesman. “If there was an individual who would have tested positive, we would have told that individual to stay home, and told them to contact their close contacts, which includes their place of employment, of a positive test.”
Admittedly, with more than 2,000 confirmed cases in the state, that would be a lot of strings to follow from family to work to school to grocery stores and movie theaters and church on Sunday.
But that doesn’t mean that no one needs to know where they could have come in contact with the coronavirus causing a global medical and economic crisis.
And the economic impact of the pandemic is what can make that hard. With 3.3 million unemployment compensation claims filed nationwide last week, many of those still going to work every day are low-income food service and vital retail workers who may struggle with the ability to make ends meet if they reveal possible exposure.
Pennsylvania has not implemented statewide stay-at-home orders, but has shut down counties with large outbreaks, including Allegheny, and closed non-life-sustaining businesses everywhere. They did that because of an understanding that the more connections made, the more chances for exposure and infection.
That should limit the pool of people who need to be traced, making it still possible for the state to unknot the strands to notify those who may need to monitor their behavior. But the places still open and the people still moving around are all the more critical, which is why the state should still be doing tracking.
But they aren’t, and because they aren’t, all of those threads end up in the hands of regular Pennsylvanians.
We all have to keep track of them. We owe ourselves and each other to be as responsible with that trust as we can be.
We have to minimize our contacts so that if we become exposed, we can list those we have come in contact with quickly and accurately. We have a duty to keep ourselves safe because that keeps the people we love and the people we work with and the people at school and church and the grocery store safe.
And if we are exposed, we have to be honest about it.
Because a lot of this is on us now.