The steady number of COVID-19 cases reported every day in Iowa is overwhelming local public health departments, as they have the big task of doing that contact tracing: tracking down people tied to a positive case.
Local 5 News: With the massive volume of COVID cases across the state, how is that contact tracing going for your office?
Denyse Gipple, Mahaska Conty Public Health: It's very challenging because it's so labor-intensive. So we could call a person and make one call for 10 minutes, or we could end up making 10 calls that takes several hours. So it just depends on so much with the patient with where they've been, if they're in school, if they have a part time job.
Local 5: I would imagine with a large volume of tests, like you just said, takes a little bit more time to get through all the contact tracing that you need to do.
So how does that in turn, impact the community?
Gipple: It's rough because if we have people who didn't get tested right at the onset of symptoms, they're already a few days into their illness. If they waited a couple of days for results, then there are a couple more days in. And then if it takes us more time to call them, we can't have the impact on prevention that we'd like to have.
Local 5: So when somebody does test positive and and you approach them to do that contact tracing, how helpful are cooperative have they been? And do they even really know where they got it?
Gipple: So some people have been pretty helpful, and they can tell us where they've been. And maybe somebody that was positive that they came into contact with. Some people have already been called their own their contacts ahead of time. So every once in a while, we get somebody that's very helpful that's already thought about that.
But, you know, other times, there's people that have just been a lot of places, and it becomes difficult when we try to think of all the people they've been in close contact with, especially on masks.
Local 5: I would imagine that this isn't just the kind of job you show up and just do .. there are some specific challenges here and there?
Gipple: Yeah, absolutely. You know, some people are really helpful, and they want to make sure that they didn't spread it to anyone. So they're going to tell us everyone that they've been around, and some people don't want to talk to us.
Yeah, there's definitely some challenges. Sometimes it's just finding phone numbers for people. So we're kind of detectives in a way: we get to find a way to contact people and then figure out ways to get them to listen to our message as well.
Local 5: And when you're done doing that tracing, what do you do with that information?
Gipple: So we're in daily communication with our schools and different workplaces. So we keep a kind of a spreadsheet to track the the students that are quarantined or positive and then we send that out to the schools so they know people's return dates.
We work, you know, closely with the health care workers, long term cares and we're communicating those return dates to them as well. And then we're calling the contacts that need to be informed that they need to be quarantined.
So if someone's been at an event, we may have a list of 20 to 30 people that we call and we let them know what their 14-day quarantine will be, what they need to do during that time and what they shouldn't do during that time.
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