ROCK ISLAND COUNTY, Ill. — It starts with a positive test. While a team of doctors and nurses work to bring a COVID-19 patient back to health, other medical professionals are taking on another strategy: contact tracing.
At the Rock Island County Health Department, the contact tracing team consists of five nurses and two volunteers, up from the regular three nurses during normal times.
"Contact tracing is very basic public health," said Janet Hill, chief operating officer of the county's health department. "It’s been around for hundreds of years, but we know it is the best way to keep control of the pandemic."
"In the case of Covid, we get a positive case. We talk to the person, if that person is unconscious, we talk to family about where they work, who they have been close to, where they have been."
Shaylee Laursen is one of the two volunteers, dedicating one day a week outside of her regular work as the Public Health Department's Director of School Health Link, to speak to COVID-19 patients. The other volunteer is a retired physician. Both have been pullled from the Illinois Medical Reserve Corps. The corps now boasts 175 medical and non-medical volunteers, 30 new volunteers signed up in recent months.
"This isn’t my regular job, so it’s nice for me to be able to help the community and help give back with my knowledge as a nurse," Laursen said.
While she was well versed with a public health background and contract tracing work, she said the workload proved to be a challenge. "We got a lot of cases at once, and so we had to quickly figure out how to manage the cases timewise," she said.
She starts with a print-out of the newly diagnosed patient's information, and starts calling.
"We talk about, 'What day did you first notice that you had symptoms?' And then I go back two days before that, where they went, who they were around."
Due to the workload, nearly 500 postive cases have been recorded in Rock Island County to date, the team of trackers is primarily focused on workplace and family connections.
The work is made harder because symptoms vary from patient to patient, and some don't experience major symptoms at all.
"The most surprising thing is just the wide variety of symptoms I’ve heard form patients," Laursen said. "That seems to be 3.16 the most difficult part, that there’s not a set disease pattern.
"The disease varies greatly from person to person," she added.
The work did help flag the outbreak at Tyson Foods in Joslin early on, enabling the health department to pull all hands on deck.
"We were finding out that many of the clients that we worked with early on all worked at Tyson in Joslin," Hill said. "We had been able to trace if there had been family members who didn’t work at the plant, but did have close contact with an employee."
"That’s what contact tracing does, it kinda figures out the common denominator of the situation."
The health department alerted the plant manager and worked closely with the company on mitigation efforts to reduce the number of new infections.
Patients have been forthcoming, glad to be able to help with the public health response. The answers are recorded in a database with access limited to the state's infectious disease division within the Public Health Department