Close to 100 percent of those in New York City who tested positive and shared an accurate number upon intake have been picking up the phone. And people appear to be getting used to sharing information of those they might have exposed: of those who complete interviews, about three-fourths provided tracers with information for their secondary contacts.
But getting people to pick up the phone has been just one of several challenges facing the city and state contact tracing programs. Hiring and training people, getting the technology to work, and getting different agencies to exchange information smoothly has been difficult.
Leaders of both programs say they had to ramp up their systems quickly and have had to fix problems as they emerged, but they’re already making progress.
“We stood up in a matter of a few weeks, an organization with thousands of people, from scratch—the I.T. infrastructure, the management infrastructure, the training infrastructure,” said Dr. Ted Long, a physician and administrator at the Health and Hospitals Corporation who is running the city’s Testing and Tracing Corps. “We didn't want to lose even one minute to get this up and running for New York City.”