MADISON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Every time COVID-19 infects another person in Wisconsin, county and city health departments start contact tracing.
“I would say anecdotally that nearly 100% of our local public health departments are in a crisis mode,” DHS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ryan Westergaard said in a press briefing Thursday.
It’s getting harder for contact tracers to keep up with new cases, according to Westergaard.
“The ability to respond to cases, do contact investigations, notify the contacts about the advice, that part is very strapped.”
Brown County Public Health Officer Anna Destree tells FOX 11 Westergaard’s statements hold true for her department.
“Had we attempted to do it all on our own, we would have been extremely overwhelmed and unable to do that. With that being said, we have received help in the past from De Pere Health, Oneida Tribe, partners like the medical college.”
As testing increased in Brown County, the Department of Health Services stepped in to help Brown County contact trace.
Destree says the county had five contact tracers before the pandemic.
“It’s like an all hands on deck. Now we have our whole nursing division, plus we have our staging staff. So we have roughly 15 people.”
Eleven more will get to work on Monday.
“We weren’t built to respond to a pandemic,” she added.
The number of calls contact tracers need to make varies depending on how many people a COVID positive person has been in contact with. Destree says her contact tracers estimate calling 7-10 people per positive case.
Outagamie County Health Officer Natalie Vandeveld tells FOX 11 her department is not in a crisis mode.
“We have current capacity now to make contact with those positive cases, and close contacts, and make contacts with those individuals timely. However, things may change and we know that with this pandemic.”
Outagamie County Health had six contact tracers at the start of the pandemic. Vandeveld says the department has 20 now.
“We are anticipating adding five more. Again, that planning approach is important to us so we can scale up when we needed to. We will probably have to scale up eventually as we deal with this pandemic with the next months and even through the fall.”
As of July 30th, Brown County’s total COVID case count is 2,859 more than Outagamie County.
Local health departments do have access to federal funding to hire more contact tracers.
Westergaard says there are no hospitals in a crisis mode, meaning ventilators are available.
