Almost two years after the director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention called for contact tracers to contain the coronavirus, the C.D.C. said this week that it no longer recommends universal case investigation and contact tracing. Instead, it encourages health departments to focus those practices on high-risk settings, the New York Times reported.
The turning point comes as the global outlook continues to improve rapidly, with new cases, hospitalisations and deaths all continuing to fall even as the path out of the pandemic remains complicated. The dominance of variants with very short incubation periods and rapid transmissibility combined with high levels of infection – or vaccine-induced immunity and the wide availability of vaccines for most age groups, made the change possible.
The recommendation also reflects the reality that due to the nature of Omicron – rapid transmissibility, mild symptoms and quick recovery – underreporting and nonreporting of incidences made case identification and contact tracing impossible. This resulted in the elimination of contact-tracing programmes in many countries.
Britain ended contact tracing last week, while Denmark and Finland are among other nations that have scaled back the use of contact tracers. Many states in North America ended their contact-tracing programmes as well, and are moving toward treating the coronavirus as another manageable virus.
The original goal of contact tracing was to reach people who have spent more than 15 minutes within six feet of an infected person, and ask them to quarantine at home voluntarily for two weeks even if they test negative. The aim was to reduce transmission while persons who tested positive monitored themselves for symptoms during their isolation.
Case investigation is used to identify and understand cases, clusters and outbreaks that require health department intervention.
Now the C.D.C. is pushing health departments to focus solely on high-risk settings, like long-term care facilities, jails and prisons, and shelters. This “updated guidance is in response to changes in the nature of the pandemic and the increasing availability of new tools to prevent transmission and mitigate illness. We’re now at a different stage of the pandemic,” Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said on Tuesday.
