Contact tracing: are we prepared?

One survey says MN and IA aren't prepared when it comes to COVID-19 contact tracing.

Total to 148./// contact tracing is one of the most powerful tools in the fight against the coronavirus..

But a new survey by national public radio shows most states?

Including minnesota and iowa?

Don't have enough people to do it.

Kimt news three's raquel hellman is looking into this issue.

She joins us now live in rochester to explain?

Raquel?xxx live this map from ??r shows which states meet the estimated need for contact tracers.

Yellow means the state does*not meet the need and as you can see?

There's a whole lot of yellow?

Including minnesota and iowa.

But before we can understand why our states are falling short?

We have to understand exactly what contact tracing is.

So i turned to the experts.xxx 'if i were to develop covi?

19, the idea would be that through the public health infrastructur e, they would say, 'ok, in the last 14 days, who have you been in contact with?'

You can imagine how difficult that is and how much labor it takes to do that.

According to this ??r survey?

There are just not enough people to do that right now.

The national association of county and city health officials estimates 30 workers per 10?thousand people are needed to do contact tracing during the covi?19 pandemic.

And this survey finds minnesota only has about on?

Poin?eight workers per 10?thousand residents./// after seeing this ??r survey i reached out to the minnesota deparmtent of health for some answers.

They tell me the results were taken a bit out of context because their questions were asked early last week?

And this is a constantly changing situation.

Department of health officials sent me a statement that says in part?

At the time npr was soliciting information from states, we had adequate staff assigned to contact tracing, and mdh was not actively hiring contact tracers in part because of a hiring freeze in the state and because our plans are to reassign existing state employees to do the work as the need grows."

They say they've been continuously adding staff to do contact tracing as the case load requires?

And they're pulling qualified staff from all areas of the department as needed.

The state is working with local public health agencies to start using their staff for contact tracing as well.

Live in rochester, raquel hellman, kimt news three./// thanks raquel.

The ??r survey shows iowa has 36 contact tracers?

With plans to hire about 200 more.

That means they would have about 7.5 contact tracers for every 10?

Thousand residents.

That's more than minnesota?

But still well below the 30 workers the national association of county and city health officials estimates is needed during the coronavirus pandemic./// here's a live look