‘It just kind of snowballs.’ Health officials can’t track COVID-19 spread in Middle Georgia
Health officials who oversee 13 Middle Georgia counties are unable to provide information about the origin, patterns and spread of the new coronavirus, citing the number of cases and limited staff.
The North Central Health District covers 13 counties, including Macon-Bibb, Houston and Peach. NCHD Public Information Officer Michael Hokanson said the district is not able to do full investigations into county outbreaks — known as contact tracing — and now asks people who test positive for COVID-19 to warn people with whom they’ve come into contact.
The NCHD does gather information from high-risk individuals, healthcare workers, law enforcement officers, first responders and any large groups of people, like church congregations, if someone who tests positive came into contact with them.
“If it is just a bunch of individuals that the positive case has been in contact with, we do not have the manpower to do that kind of contact tracing,” Hokanson said. “We are limited in the same ways that every public health place is right now, and that is [workers].”
In Middle Georgia, Houston County looks like a COVID-19 hotspot, based on case totals released by the Georgia Department of Public Health. The Telegraph reported in March that up to 90 people had potentially been exposed to the new coronavirus at the Lake Joy Med-Stop. But Hokanson said that higher COVID-19 numbers in Houston County could also be due to more testing.
“Since we are not doing that in-depth individual contact tracing anymore we can’t say 100% that so many cases are linked to this specific case.” Hokanson said. “One of the reasons why we see a larger group in one particular place is mainly because more testing is being done. We know that Houston County is doing a lot of testing.”
Contract tracing around Georgia
Aside from Sumter County, the district’s hardest-hit county, Pamela Kirkland, a spokesperson for the West Central Health District in Columbus said the department was unable to provide information about the connections between coronavirus cases in the district.
Tracking the origin and spread is too difficult given the number of cases, she said.
The district’s two epidemiologists are just trying to keep up with the influx of cases, Kirkland said.
“When there are a few cases of something, that’s when they’d do that contact tracing and have the time to really research. But in a pandemic there are just so many cases,” she said. “It just kind of snowballs and they aren’t able to keep up. ...We’re doing the best we can do.”
When a patient tests positive for COVID-19, the health district notifies the patients and collects information about the patient’s close contacts, their employer, how long they’ve had symptoms and other places they’ve traveled.
Struggles across the U.S.
The problem is not unique to Georgia: local and state health departments across the country are struggling to investigate how the coronavirus is spreading. CDC director Robert Redfield told NPR the United States is working to ramp up testing and contact tracing measures as precursors to any national effort to return to “normal life.”
Redfield said local and state health departments likely wouldn’t have the staff to do the time consuming and difficult contact tracing, so the federal government could provide assistance through the CDC staff. It’s unclear how the CDC plans to accomplish this, but Redford told NPR an announcement was coming soon.
“It is going to be critical,” he said of tracking contacts. “We can’t afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission.”
Global tech giants Apple and Google announced last week they were joining forces to provide contact tracing information to the federal government.
This story was originally published April 15, 2020 at 7:00 AM.