More than 3,000 COVID-19 interviews a day planned as county seeks to ‘quickly ramp up’ contact tracing program

Cook County health officials hope to reach out to more than 3,000 people a day to alert them that they could have been exposed to the coronavirus under a $40 million expansion of the county’s contact tracing program.

The county’s Public Health Department plans to wind up with 400 contact tracers total — a dramatic increase from the 25 they already have for the program.

The $40 million investment, which comes from coronavirus relief funding, is a crucial step as the county begins to reopen, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said.

“For Cook County to reopen it is critical that we quickly ramp up our contact tracing capabilities,” Preckwinkle said at a Thursday morning news conference. “The program will help us continue to mitigate the pandemic by identifying new cases quickly and helping residents who’ve been exposed to someone carrying the disease.”

The goal is to help county residents isolate themselves or seek care if they need it to prevent further spread of the virus, Preckwinkle said.

Contact tracing is the process of talking to people who’ve been newly diagnosed with the coronavirus to determine who they’ve had close contact with.

The county will prioritize hiring contact tracers from communities that have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic in order to establish trust within those communities, said Dr. Kiran Joshi, one of the leaders of the county’s public health arm.

People can currently express interest in becoming a contact tracer, though hiring won’t likely begin until the end of July with the intent to get people involved in early August, said Dr. Rachel Rubin, the other head of the department.

The program will be bilingual to ensure the roughly 1 million Spanish-speaking county residents have access to information and services.

The number of new cases and deaths from the virus are decreasing, and the positivity rate has decreased to a 9% average for the Northeast Illinois region, a “tremendous decline over the last month,” Rubin said.

The county hasn’t seen a surge of cases since the state moved into Phase 3 of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s reopening plan — or from a spate of protests last week following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — but the county is watching for any surges that may occur “over the next few days or weeks,” Rubin said.

On the contact tracing front, Rubin said the information received from interviews will be kept confidential and entered into the state’s disease surveillance database.

“Contract tracing is extremely important to mitigate the next surge or outbreak of disease,” Rubin said.