Contact Tracers

There is a severe shortage of contact tracers in the United States and in many other countries. This shortage was amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic (which began in 2019 and ceased to be a public health emergency on May 5, 2023) when there were not enough contact tracers to effectively track the spread of the virus.

Early during the pandemic, an April 2020 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimated that approximately 100,000 paid or volunteer contract tracers were needed to effectively address the situation, while other sources provided much larger estimations, ranging between 180,000 and 300,000. The recent crisis made it clear that more contact tracers are needed, which suggests that many of these new workers will continue to be employed to fight other infectious disease outbreaks in coming years. Mosquito-borne viruses were becoming more common during the mid-2020s. One example was an uptick in West Nile virus that impacted the United States during the summer of 2024.

Technology companies are developing apps that use smartphones and Bluetooth technology to allow infected people to inform public health authorities that they have been infected. The authorities could then notify anyone who has come near the infected person’s phone during a certain amount of time where the individual had been contagious. The development of such apps may reduce the need for contact tracers, but there is no technology that can entirely replace the time-intensive, investigative work of these professionals.