196 - Contact Tracing for COVID-19 in New York City
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New York City's contact tracing program, officially launched on June 1, is one of the largest in the nation. Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor's senior adviser for public health, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the trained workforce of 4,000 people that is now reaching more than 90% of new cases in the city. The program also helps provide services like dog walking and grocery delivery so that people can isolate safely at home. As COVID cases start to climb again in New York, contact tracing and robust testing remain critical aspects of the city's public health response that can help delay or avoid shutdowns.
KEYWORDS: pandemic response; policy
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:11.6 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.8 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public |
| 0:32.5 | health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at |
| 0:39.8 | Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast |
| 0:47.8 | episodes. Today, I speak to Dr. J. Varma, the senior advisor for public health for the mayor of New York City. |
| 0:55.8 | Our topic is the city's ambitious effort at contact tracing. |
| 1:00.4 | Let's listen. |
| 1:01.6 | Dr. Varma, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 1:04.1 | Take me back to when the New York City contact tracing program started. |
| 1:09.3 | Yeah, so this had been a program that we had really wanted to get up and running as quickly |
| 1:15.4 | as possible. |
| 1:16.5 | We knew that the only way that we could get to a level of New York City where we could |
| 1:20.5 | return people to some semblance of normalcy, you know, we're opening businesses and schools, |
| 1:27.4 | was if we had a contact tracing |
| 1:29.0 | program that accompanied the standard social distancing matters. |
| 1:32.8 | So we officially launched on June 1st, which was the result of many, many weeks of planning, |
| 1:39.8 | staffing, IT improvements, and capacity building. |
| 1:43.9 | And at the time that we started, we were around |
... |
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