It could cost billions of dollars to rapidly recruit, train and deploy a massive new public health workforce to identify every of COVID-19 case and trace the contacts of each individual, according to the recommendations in a new report coauthored by university health experts and an organization representing U.S. state and territorial health officials.
“If we don’t do that, we will not be able to lift these blunt social distancing measures that are keeping everyone at home,” said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and one of the lead authors of the report…
To meet the enormous challenges facing the country, the authors of the report estimate it would require a $3.6 billion emergency investment from the federal government to fund the hiring of up to 100-thousand contact tracers, who would be strategically deployed to work with state public health departments.
“This is an intensive proposition to contact these people and we have a lot of transmissions in the country right now,” Watson said.
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