Santa Clara County is calling for volunteers to build a new corps of 1,000 disease investigators and contact tracers who can help track and contain the coronavirus.
Between 15 and 30 people test positive for the coronavirus every day in Santa Clara County. Each of those people is in regular contact with four or five other people in their home, or immediate community, that they may have infected.
A contact tracer’s job is to call those four or five other people to let them know they might be sick — even if they don’t feel sick — and make sure they have the resources to stay home and isolate themselves so they don’t spread the virus further.
“Right now people tend to have very few contacts while we shelter in place,” said Dr. Sarah Rudman, Santa Clara County assistant health officer. “We expect that as shelter in place is lessened, people are going to have more contacts, and that's why we need to be able to have a larger workforce to reach those folks as well.”
The county is first redeploying other county employees, like librarians, to train for the new workforce. But to reach 1,000 positions, they're also asking for volunteers from the community.