But if there are not enough coronavirus tests available, authorities may not want to panic people by recommending they get tested, he said. In Singapore, government efforts to target every coronavirus case and find anyone who had close contact with the infected person was called the "gold standard" of case detection in a February Harvard University study.Īkhter, who works in emergency rooms for Valleywide Health, Florence Hospital and hospitals in Pennsylvania and Masschusetts, said he doesn't know the details of the Tucson case. Those countries and regions have a culture of immediately starting to social distance in an outbreak and listening to authorities, either because they want to or are forced to, he said. South Korea and Singapore, along with Hong Kong and Japan, have experienced outbreaks before, including H1N1 flu, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome).
Murtaza Akhter, an assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix. "The reason it is so critical is to be able to track the spread, how quickly it is spreading and which communities are most affected so as to be able to contain it," said Dr. And others were sick and wondering if they were another case in the global pandemic.Ĭontact tracing was a key component of the response to COVID-19 in South Korea and Singapore, which have avoided the community spread that has occurred in the United States and Europe. Some had secured the new drive-by COVID-19 test. All them said they had not been contacted by health officials. Many bridge players contacted by The Republic said they had no symptoms and were not concerned about being exposed to coronavirus. "You should be able to get that list and quickly reach out to those individuals and tell them to self-quarantine for both groups and ideally have them reach out to their friends and family who they have been in contact with since that time," Silvera said.
Contact tracing for a public place like a mall would be much more difficult because there isn't a list of everyone who was there. "One of the big challenges, I would say, is that it can be pretty expensive, and so it is a lot of work to track down everyone and identify who they are."īut Silvera said the two Tucson bridge tournaments are examples of where contact tracing could take much less time because the exposure was at a specific place and time and it would be easy to get a list of everyone who attended. "It can actually be good in decreasing the spread of the disease especially in the early stages of an outbreak," said Stephanie Silvera, an epidemiologist and professor of public health at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
The goal during the coronavirus outbreak is to ensure those who had contact with the infected person isolate themselves for 14 days to prevent further spread of the disease. "Contact tracing" is a monitoring process that involves identifying and following up with anyone who may have come in close contact with an infected person. "He said he had a conversation with Couchman, he interacted him with quite a bit," Abrahams said. He said the club does not have permission to release the name of the person, who developed symptoms in recent days, beginning with a high fever.ĭuring the tournaments, the individual had direct contact with Couchman, the bridge player who first tested positive for the virus. On Friday, Abrahams, the Adobe Bridge Club president, said a second person exposed to the virus during the two bridge events in March had tested positive for the new coronavirus. “We have a responsibility to our bridge players in our club who have come in contact with someone who was infected,” Abrahams said.Ī larger, American Contract Bridge League tournament held March 2-8, and attended by more than 800 people, including Couchman, also notified participants that they may have been exposed.īut the health department apparently hasn't contacted players who attended that bridge tournament either, said event Chairman Steve Reynolds. A 79-year-old woman who played in the tournament and handled cards touched by Couchman was hospitalized with pnuemonia and died within a week of the tournament. Instead, bridge club leadership took it upon themselves to contact all 700 bridge players they know of in Tucson - nearly double the Adobe Bridge Club's membership - and notify them that they might have been exposed to coronavirus.
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“We're certainly capable of giving them a full list of names, addresses, phone numbers for all the people,” Abrahams said. Abrahams said the club has no idea how many people might be carrying the virus after coming in close contact with Couchman, whose COVID-19 test came back positive on March 16.
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