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Covid – 19 pandemic has been one of the most dreadful diseases and wraths faced by the world in the last centuries. The virus has been saying a lot of variations in its genetic material lately, which of course, has led to fast growth in the spread of the disease and its transmissibility has been seeing a quick increase lately. It thus requires the health fraternity to devise adequate and effective measures to control and contain the virus. The contact tracing covid test method is one such measure or tool that is quite valuable and effective in tracing and marking out infections and isolating them to constrain the further spread of the COVID-19 virus.
What is Contact Tracing?
Contact tracing covid test is a crucial and effective method used for tackling the COVID-19 Pandemic wherein the sequence of identifying, assessing and managing infected or exposed to infected people from covid -19 is followed. This method of contact tracing and quarantining infected people helps interrupt the chain of transmission between people, which acts as an essential tool for containing the virus and thus managing public health. Contact tracing also facilitates helping people who might be immunocompromised and, if infected, get quick help when they develop covid-19 symptoms.
What is the Method of Carrying Out Contact Tracing?
The following steps are carried out for the method of contact tracing:
- Index case, an individual having a contagious disease should be reported to the region’s health authorities or the primary healthcare provider.
- The index case is then interrogated to trace their movements, close contacts, and perhaps their sexual companions.
- The interrogation is taken forward to the suspects’ family members, health care providers, and anyone else knowing the contact’s movement or interactions.
- As soon as the contacts are identified, public health workers provide the infected contacts with the requisites such as counselling, screening, treatment etc. They are then isolated or prohibited from being a part of public gatherings necessary for disease control.
- In case the contacts are not easily identifiable, mass media might also be helpful for communicating the needful to the public.
Even though contact tracing can be upgraded by letting the contacts themselves provide the requisite information, medical treatment and references of their contacts, examples show that public involvement in notifying is highly effective and essential.
Additional Concepts of Contact Tracing
- Backward Tracing: Backward tracing, also known as reverse or retrospective tracing, is a method in which the origin of infection is established by searching for contacts before the inducement of infection.
- Forward tracing: Forward tracing is a process in which contacts are searched for after infection is induced in contact so that further spread of disease is contained effectively.
For a pandemic such as COVID-19 with high diversification in terms of infection, it makes complete sense to rely on local contacts for tracing and containing the virus. This includes adopting a hybrid tech strategy of regular forward tracing collated with backward tracking of contacts within a short time to find the origin of infection of the index case itself in the first case. The friendship paradox, a variant of the same methods, leads to index cases having a greater number of infection by-products.
Workforce Requirements for Contact Tracing Covid Test
The process of contact tracing relies on the approximate number of covid cases and their contacts which are traced. It also depends upon the physical and technical logistical requirements which facilitate in reaching the affected sections of people and their contacts. Not just this but also their cultural and socio-political context, security patterns and much more. Public health officials and workers need to review their regional requisites, and a gender-balanced workforce is required, which also needs to be maintained accordingly across all transmission places. It is also very important to prepare a contact tracing special section of health workers to do the needful.
Conclusion
The method of contact tracing has been taken as the prime public health response to the spread of rare and fast originating infectious diseases and was brought into action for the first time in the United Kingdom during the ‘containment stage’ of the 2009 influenza pandemic. Recently, contact tracing has also been used as an effective tool in tackling the Ebola virus disease that originated in the United Kingdom in 2014, as well as the incidents of infections of monkeypox in the United Kingdom in 2018.
Not just COVID-19 but contact tracing has been highly functional in the treatment of sexually transmitted infections, where the definition of a contact is relatively straightforward, asymptomatic time period of transmission is slow.
