Second group of contact tracers being trained through West Virginia University

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — More than 100 public health students at West Virginia University along with other health professional students from WVU, nursing students from the University of Charleston and others make up a second cohort of Mountain State contact tracing trainees.

Their online training to eventually help track the spread of COVID-19 in West Virginia began last week through the WVU School of Public Health’s Contact Tracing and Pandemic Response course.

The online course was developed quickly in collaboration with the state Department of Health and Human Resources to prepare contact tracers to work in communities statewide.

Until there is a COVID-19 vaccine, “This is really our sole tool at our disposal right now to limit the forward transmission of disease,” said Dr. Chris Martin, course co-director.

“The contact tracers have to have some understanding of the infection, some of the principles of infectious disease and how this disease is spread in order to determine who are the contacts that are at risk for having acquired the infection.”

Instructions for activity restrictions follow for people identified through contact tracing as “at risk” for COVID-19 to try to limit any further forward transmission.

Dr. Chris Martin

“One person can make a huge difference in the spread of disease,” said Dr. Martin.

More than 70 people recently completed an initial round of training and were the process of being placed, via DHHR, in areas across West Virginia to support local health officials where COVID-19 case numbers are rising.

Dr. Martin said he was “flooded with interest” in the course from the start.

“Often these were people who had academic backgrounds or healthcare backgrounds, some retired individuals who contacted me and simply wanted to help and that’s the first group that we trained,” he said.

Dr. Cathy Slemp, state health officer and commissioner for DHHR’s Bureau for Public Health, has estimated 300 contract tracers would be needed to effectively track COVID-19 in the coming weeks and months in West Virginia.

The course, designed to help build up that number of public health investigators, was being offered as a credited course for students, a free, non-credit course to volunteers and used to help other health students build needed service hours.

“Contact tracing, in its modern form, was developed in the 1930s for sexually-transmitted infections because it was recognized that, once you diagnosed a case, you then had to systematically go out and identify all the contacts,” Dr. Martin said.

“It’s very common to any infectious disease.”

Course topics included basics of infectious disease epidemiology with reference to COVID-19, a general overview of COVID-19 testing, infection control measures for COVID-19, public health surveillance and motivational interviewing.

All participants who completed training were required to assist with contact tracing efforts in West Virginia at community levels.





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