Contact tracing for COVID-19: New considerations for its practical application
Contact tracing, a venerable public-health approach, is being widely applied in the fight against COVID-19. Collaborative public-health and private-sector efforts are addressing new social and medical challenges in diverse ways.
Contact tracing is a decades-old tool for helping control the spread of infectious diseases. It has been used successfully in efforts to contain Ebola, SARS, MERS, tuberculosis, and other disease outbreaks.1 It is now a critical part of the fight against COVID-19. In practice, contact tracing begins with those who test positive for COVID-19. Those with whom they have had close contact are then identified, as they may have been infected too. These contacts are notified and supported through a period of quarantine—until they develop symptoms, pass the window of risk, or are proven not to have been exposed. Widespread testing enables optimally effective contact tracing (Exhibit 1).
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Πηγή: mckinsey
