by SARAH THOMACK
St. Joseph Post
As Buchanan County receives applications for the $10.2 million received from the state through the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, some funds are being earmarked for COVID-19 antibody testing and contact tracing.
Director of Health for the City of St. Joseph Health Department Debra Bradley says when the coronavirus began spreading in the U.S., they started training all additional non-clinical staff, which ended up being nine people, to do contact tracing.
Bradley says each positive case can result in a 20-minute to hour-long phone call with each person who was in close contact with the person who tested positive.
“You provide them with education about being possibly exposed to the virus and the need to self-quarantine and how to watch for symptoms if they were to develop symptoms or what to do if they do develop symptoms or become sick,” Bradley tells St. Joseph Post. “So there’s quite a bit of education that goes along with it.”
Bradley says in the last two weeks, there have been 66 individuals who have tested positive in Buchanan County, which would be the best estimate of how many active cases there are. Bradley says, without a team of people who can regularly check up with each of the over 700 individuals who have tested positive since March, it’s difficult to know exactly who is officially recovered or who is still having symptoms.
“There’s people who tested positive maybe three weeks ago and they’re still having symptoms. So they have not really recovered but because we haven’t had the staff to call people on a regular basis, we don’t know how many people that is,” Bradley says. “And the state has not provided any kind of guidance as far as how to identify people who are considered recovered. They actually said 30 days and said count it good if it’s been more than 30 days since they’ve tested positive, but we also know there’s people who have been sick for more than 30 days.”
Bradley says she presented an ordinance to the city council to request hiring five individuals to do contact tracing full time through the end of the year. Bradley says the health department could then apply for reimbursement through the CARES Act.
Buchanan County Presiding Commissioner Lee Sawyer says about $100,000 from the CARES Act funds have been earmarked to the city for contact tracing purposes.
Sawyer says after discussions with several doctors from Mosaic Life Care, about $170,000 in CARES Act funds could also be set aside for possible antibody testing later this summer. The testing would ideally be a random sample of community members to find who may have had COVID-19 with no symptoms.
“They've got some statistical calculations, it would say, ok, if we test 'X' number of people in sort of a cross path way to do that, we could take those numbers and extrapolate what it would mean for the whole community," Sawyer tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. "If the medical professionals are saying this would be the most important type of testing we could do going into the next season, then I think we really need to work hard to make that happen."
Sawyer says they have received around 45 applications so far for CARES Act funding.