Years ago, Saskatoon communicable disease medical health officer Dr. Johnmark Opondo says he was working in New York, helping to locate and contact people who contracted sexually transmitted diseases.
There, he learned some of the best ways to get information from people — even if they didn’t want to speak with him.
Contact tracers need to be engaging, open and good at gathering data. That way the disease can be managed, and action taken.
“We’re trying to control communicable disease,” he said. “And it’s about how we use our public health disease detectives to track down the movement of disease and quickly take action and bring the situation under control.”
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic hitting Saskatchewan, the Saskatoon area had about 3.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) contact tracing positions – or five to six people in total. By mid-April, that number had swelled nearly 10 times, to 30 FTE positions, mainly performed by nurses in casual positions.
“This is the detective work of public health,” said Opondo. “We would ask you, ‘Who do you live with in your household? Give us the full list of names. Are they all present in the household?’ And then we go back two weeks to see if anyone else has been in that household.”
They also ask about a person’s typical day; where everyone has been — shopping, restaurants, work — and the dates they went to those locations.
“It’s not difficult, but it’s very, very labour intensive,” he explains. “You need to be a skilled interviewer. You need to keep people engaged and interested because contact tracing is only as good as the information you’re getting.”
He says contact tracers have done thousands of interviews, worked to try to educate those they speak with about how to try to protect themselves. The interviews continue as long as they’re finding people with symptoms or with direct contact to an infected individual.
“If they give us 40 people and 400 contacts, we will still follow all 400,” Opondo said. “In our case we’re on secondary — a few tertiary — but that’s very uncommon in Saskatchewan. We’re getting to it very quickly.”
Opondo also stresses that contact tracing is only one part of the equation. The public must do its own due diligence as well by hand-washing, wearing masks when distancing isn’t an option, staying out of large group settings and staying home when ill.
“Each strategy has a barrier — they have holes,” he said. “But if you practise all of these, then you have a strong barrier. All of those is what prevents transmission, and that’s what will control COVID-19 for us in Saskatchewan.”
