Massachusetts created a pioneering program to track COVID-19 cases. Its challenges are multiplying as the state reopens. Liberia, a nation of five million people, eventually employed as many as ten thousand tracers. At the time of the Ebola outbreak, Liberia’s public hospitals employed a total of 50 physicians. It relied instead on an army of amateur community-health workers, who could take on the work of contact tracing. Dr. Welch recalled that, after he had been in the region for 8 months; “if you told me there would be an outbreak in a particular region, I could tell you which village. If you told me the village, I could tell you which house.” “If you ask me how we beat Ebola in West Africa, there’s a three-second answer, contact tracing!”
At www.newyorker.com
