People who test positive after taking a Covid-19 test, as pictured above, are logged into a database and assigned as a new case to contract tracers at the health department who call them to find out who they've been around and where they've been. | Rick Bowmer/AP Photo
ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to deploy New York’s army of more than 2,000 contact tracers to places battling rising numbers of Covid-19 cases — even as the state faces compliance and other issues that have hampered its efforts to track and isolate the coronavirus.
State officials say their program has prevented recent outbreaks from spreading, thereby helping New York avoid resurgences seen in southern and western states.
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Atlanta will be the first city to take advantage of New York’s offer for help. With Covid-19 cases rising there, Cuomo said he’s sending a team to assist Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms with coronavirus testing and contact tracing.
New York is also in talks with officials from Houston and other cities that have become hot spots for the virus on how it can help with contact tracing, said Larry Schwartz, the former secretary to the governor and a member of Cuomo’s Covid-19 task force.
“All possibilities exist,” Schwartz said in an interview. “Right now, I’m not aware of any requests from any other states, but we’re happy to enter into that discussion if any state needs help.”
Schwartz, who is helping to oversee the state’s contact tracing effort, said New York can deploy its tracers — who work remotely for Public Consulting Group — to other hot spots. The state, which partnered with Bloomberg Philanthropies, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Vital Strategies in April to create the NYS Contact Tracing Program, can also share its online training program and case management system with local tracers.
During a press conference Monday, Cuomo told Bottoms that, “we’re here for you, the concept of ‘pay it forward.' Whatever we can do on any level, we have people who’ve been through this and actually know, and we stand ready.”
Even though New York is touting its contact tracing efforts as a model for other states, individuals’ compliance with tracers has varied in the Empire State — particularly in New York City, which runs its own program that shares information and cases with the state.
Between June 1 and July 4, 6,752 people completed the city's interview out of 10,910 cases with an accurate pone number and 12,384 cases total.
Annabel Palma, chief equity officer of the coronavirus tracing effort run by NYC Health + Hospitals, said last month that some people “do not trust and initially don't want to accept the call.”
Local health officials in Rockland County, meanwhile, recently turned to subpoenas to stem a Covid-19 outbreak linked to a party after the host and other attendees reportedly failed to respond to contact tracers.
Overall, the state's contact tracers have had an 86 percent success rate in reaching and interviewing New Yorkers who have tested positive for coronavirus since the program went live in mid-May, Schwartz said. They have also had about an 81 percent success rate reaching all of those individuals’ contacts. (The state did not provide case totals showing how it reached its percentages.)
That compliance, Schwartz said, has helped New York quell the possibility of community spread of Covid-19 from clusters reported at an Oswego County apple packaging plant and Montgomery County aluminum manufacturer last month.
While New York has yet to take action to force those who do not respond to contact tracers to comply with the program, Schwartz said, it “always has options,” as do local health officials who take the lead on such investigations.
“We want people to cooperate. We’re not here to treat them as criminals. We need the information, they should want the same things we want, which is to make sure that people are safe and healthy and they don’t contract it,” he said. “While I think we’re doing a really good job and we’re really being effective — and I think it’s demonstrated based on the low number of positive cases that the state is seeing — nothing is perfect, it’s not an exact science.”
Schwartz said that while New York is unlikely to become "virus free," its push to contact trace and test as many people as possible should help prevent or minimize the future spread in the state.
"Keeping it to a bare minimum is the goal here," he said. "I think the governor's achieved it. Hopefully we can keep it going."
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