Indiana’s centralized COVID-19 contact tracing effort officially began Monday. While it’s mainly been up to local health departments until now, the state has contracted with a company called Maximus to operate a statewide call center and notification system.
State Health Commissioner Dr. Kris Box announced Monday that the system is now in use in 21 counties, with the rest scheduled to join next week. She said that contact tracing isn’t anything new for her department. “That has been something that’s been ongoing for like over 100 years in our state and not really anything unusual to be honest,” Box explained. “The big difference here is that this is on a much wider scale during the middle of a pandemic, so it’s all across our state with many, many more people affected.”
The way contact tracing works is that those who test positive are asked a series of questions about when their symptoms started and who they may have been in contact with. Box said those people are then contacted, but they’re never given the name of the original patient. “We do not call an individual and say, ‘Hey, you were exposed to Mike Smith on Saturday at the wedding, and we think you could have COVID-19 or you could show up with COVID-19,’” Box explained. “We do not release names with regards to anyone. Now, do, sometimes, people figure that out? Probably, that happens.”
Box said Maximus has hired 325 contact tracers so far, with 500 to be in place by the end of the month. All of them are Indiana residents or students at one of the state’s colleges or universities, according to state officials.
Locally, the switch to centralized contact tracing may change the way that COVID-19 cases are reported to the public. Until now, the Starke County Health Department has announced positive cases whenever they’ve been confirmed. But Starke County Health Nurse Frank Lynch says that after Maximus takes over next Monday, he may not be notified of most individual cases before they’re released by the state, which only occurs once a day.
