There are just four full months left in 2020 — perhaps the most disruptive and revolutionary year of the century. Education has changed forevermore, as have the opportunities that are available to students upon graduating. Preparing adolescents for the ‘jobs of the future’ has never been more important yet in so many industries we do not know what the future holds. What we do know is there are vacancies across the country for contact tracers, and it is vital that we provide training to ensure public health departments can be sufficiently staffed.
Enter Bloomberg Philanthropies, Coursera, and the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The organizations have come together to provide a free program to train contact tracers. Passing the course is mandatory for thousands of new contact tracing hires in the state of New York, but it is also available for access by anyone who is interested to take it.
The lead instructor is Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. The six-hour Coursera class is called ‘COVID-19 Contact Tracing’ and is focused on ‘providing lessons on interviewing people diagnosed with the virus, identifying their close contact who might have been exposed, and providing them guidance for self-quarantine for two weeks.’
It is not an easy task says Gurley, but contact tracers are providing an important public service in fighting the pandemic. “Everyone has to participate to make this work and try to prevent spread,” Gurley says. “Even if you stop one or two new infections, you’re preventing many new cases down the line,” Gurley says. The potential audience for the program is huge. A recent Johns Hopkins study estimates 100,000 contact tracers will be needed to safely reopen the economy. More than 400 people signed up within hours of the course being announced.
“Anyone in the country now can take this course and get a certificate to demonstrate that they understand these key aspects of contact tracing,” says Joshua Sharfstein, the vice dean of Public Health Practice at Johns Hopkins. He is enthusiastic about the program being open sourced and free to whoever is interested. “Other communities may similarly adopt this particular course or maybe they’ll give students a few options.”
There are 5 broad areas that are covered in the Johns Hopkins program:
- Basic information on the virus and COVID-19 including symptoms of infection and how the virus is transmitted.
- Fundamentals of contact tracing, such as how to define a case, identify their contacts, and calculate how long a contact should isolate.
- Steps involved in investigating cases and tracing their contacts, including simulated scenes performed by professional actors who illustrate potential interactions that tracers may experience with infected individuals and their contacts.
- Ethics of contacts tracing, including balancing privacy and public health considerations, and examples of basic technology tools that can facilitate contact tracing, such as using text messaging for check-ins and reminders.
- Skills for effective communications in the tracing process, such as what it means to be an active listener and how to deal with common challenges that arise when investigating cases.
Johns Hopkins is not the only institution working to get more students into the field. Destinations Career Academy (DCA) is an online portal that prepares students for careers in healthcare. It just announced a partnership with Tallo to connect high school students with potential jobs as contact tracers. DCA helps students develop their resumes, write cover letters, and sends out contact tracing opportunities in each state.
“It’s so important that these professionals have the knowledge, language, and culturally responsive skill set necessary to serve their communities,” says Dr. Sherri Wilson. Wilson is a registered nurse and the director of the DCA Health Careers Program. “Contact tracers are vital in helping to prevent the further spread of disease, thereby promoting the health of a population.”