Photo courtesy of Methodist Hospital of Southern California
Contact tracing is a key strategy to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. But for a virus with high transmission rates and large numbers of asymptomatic carriers, traditional methods can fall short.
That was the case at Methodist Hospital of Southern California, according to Dr. Bala Chandrasekhar, the chief medical officer at Methodist.
The 348-bed hospital had experience with contact tracing before the pandemic, but it was a manual process that could take up to two weeks to get infection information.
When the pandemic hit, that response time only got worse.
"Notifying people was late, the information was based on memory so it was incomplete and very unsatisfying," Chandrasekhar said. "And with COVID, there are quite a number of people who are asymptomatic carriers, so by the time you got all this information, you could be carrying it to other healthcare workers, to other doctors and to your family."