Bloomberg health adviser to help lead contact-tracing effort
Dr. Kelly Henning directed New York City's Division of Epidemiology for three years. Credit: The Washington Post
A longtime public health adviser to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will help lead an army tasked with halting the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing — the arduous process of identifying people who may have been infected through recent contacts with a person known to carry the disease.
Joining the state's contact tracing team will be Dr. Kelly Henning, who directed the city’s Division of Epidemiology for three years and has led the public health program for Bloomberg's philanthropic arm since 2007.
"We've never mounted a contact tracing program in the United States as large as the one we're talking about right now," Henning said in an interview.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has called the "monumental" effort key to enabling New Yorkers to return to work sometime soon. On Wednesday he enlisted help from Bloomberg, whose philanthropy donated $10 million to the cause.
"I'm hopeful as the number of cases per day declines that it will be possible for health departments to take this on," said Henning, a medical doctor and epidemiologist trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases and public health. "We need to use every tool we have to slowly release ourselves back into the community."
Hiring 'disease investigators'
The drive is likely to require hiring as many as 3,000 "disease investigators" statewide over the next month, Henning said.
An influx of federal, state and private funding has been welcomed by public health experts.
"Doing this with scarce resources is an almost impossible task," said Anthony J. Santella, associate professor of public health at Hofstra University. "The good news is that you don't have to be a trained health professional to do contact tracing."
Cuomo has said he hopes to recruit thousands of medical students to help in the work of questioning patients who have tested positive to identify their contacts over the previous two weeks.
"They should be up and running about a month from now," Santella said of the state's ramped-up effort.
Henning said the contact tracing program will likely begin first in "hard-hit" areas like Long Island and will focus on newly confirmed cases of the virus, which should average about 300 a day locally.
She also said the contact tracing effort will identify possible "clusters of cases" to help avoid a resurgence of the disease, especially during the fall when experts fear a second wave.
Under the state's tentative plan, Henning explained that people with newly confirmed coronavirus cases “would identify all of their contacts, all of the people they were in contact with for a prolonged period of time.”
After that, she said, “the public health authorities would reach out to those people, notify them that they've been in contact with a case of coronavirus and ask them to quarantine for 14 days, while looking very carefully for any evidence of symptoms."
Efforts nationwide
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker announced on April 3 that the state would enlist 1,000 contact tracers by the end of the month to help mitigate its COVID-19 spread. Partners in Health, a Boston-based global nonprofit with experience responding to outbreaks including Ebola in West Africa, is hiring and training the staff that will call positive patients and retrace their recent steps.
The day before the Cuomo/Bloomberg announcement, the Rockefeller Foundation released a “National COVID1-9 Testing Action Plan” that called for state health departments to launch “COVID Community Healthcare Corps” that would employ as many as 300,000 people nationwide to serve as contact tracers.
Economist Glen Weyl — who contributed to the “Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience” by Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics — noted that in some areas, such as East Texas, local counties have directly hired large numbers of contact tracers who are more attuned to the needs of the area’s rural residents.
“Harnessing a variety of different actors to do this may actually be more agile than trying to centralize everything — and also may be better from the perspective of privacy and trust,” Weyl said. “Those local communities are going to defend the information of the people who are their peers more effectively than would some centrally administered program.”
But no matter where or how it’s being administered, scaled-up contact tracing — joined with testing and isolation — is vital to a successful COVID-19 containment effort, Weyl said, noting successes in China, Australia, South Korea and Singapore.
“Testing, tracing, supported isolation,” he said. “I’m not aware of any case that has consistently used those three elements where it hasn’t been contained. So there’s a pretty clear recipe here for success.”
CORRECTION: Dr. Kelly Henning has led the public health campaign of Bloomberg's philanthropic arm since 2007. The headline on an earlier version of this story described her role incorrectly.
Thomas Maier is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
