Contact tracing means long hours for public health nurses

GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) — Behind a series of locked doors, a temperature screening area and at the back of highly sanitized pathways sits the quaint office of Campbell County Public Health nurse Joli Carr.

Inside, she sits at a desk surrounded by piles of forms with contact tracing notes. It’s her responsibility, and the responsibility of her coworkers as well, to track as much of the spread of the coronavirus in Campbell County as possible through the use of her office phone.

Even as Carr sits alone to call those who have tested positive for the coronavirus, along with anyone they may have recently come in contact with, she wears a mask and face shield.

Carr calmly dials the number of someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. A few rings later there’s an answer. The only sound in the room aside from her questions is the scratch of her pen jotting down the answers to her series of questions: When did symptoms show up? Have they gone anywhere since then? Who have they been around?

When Carr finishes the call, she doesn’t have much time to rest. She picks the phone up again and starts calling the patient’s contacts.

Before the pandemic, the public health nurses spent a lot of their time doing community outreach and education. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, however, they’ve spent nearly all of their time on the phone, calling people who’ve been exposed to the virus.

They take turns working on weekends to conduct contact tracing for any cases that come in on Saturday or Sunday.

As the number of coronavirus cases continues to climb, both locally and nationwide, contact tracing has become vitally important to track the spread of the virus and how it’s transmitted from person to person, the Gillette News Record reports.

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