![]() The company pays $16 an hour for employees to make calls from home on their own computer while charging the state nearly $40 an hour for each worker’s time, according to its contract. That amount has likely grown as they’ve hired hundreds more contact tracers than first estimated - around 900 at this point. The company hired by the state to manage contact tracing doesn’t publish any data that would show its productivity.Īt first, Tennessee repurposed hundreds of idled state employees to monitor contacts but needed to replace them once their usual jobs resumed.ĭocuments obtained under the state’s open records law show the state Department of Health signed an initial $20 million contract in June with XTend Healthcare based in Hendersonville. “I don’t know that there’s a good reason to keep contact tracing if it’s not going to work in a timely fashion,” Baker says.īut it’s unclear if the anecdotal delays are improving over time or worsening. He even went to the zoo, oblivious that he should be holed up in his house. And he’d been hanging out with friends and going to his after-school job. Her teenage son had been exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID at his high school.īut by the time they got the call in early October, he only had a few days left to quarantine. “I mean, what’s the point of finding this out 11 days later?” she asks. And many families interviewed by WPLN News have stories like Kellie Baker, a real estate agent in Williamson County. But to be most effective, it requires moving quickly. Many take the same one-day crash course from Johns Hopkins University.Īt this point in the pandemic, contact tracers are mostly focused on getting positive patients to isolate, convincing their contacts to quarantine for 14 days and identifying clusters of cases in hopes of stopping transmission. And there weren’t even close to enough contact tracers to do the job, so they’ve had to train them. And despite spending tens of millions of dollars on the effort, the state has published very little evidence to show how the company is doing.Įvery state in the country has had to build a contact tracing program to handle the scale of this pandemic. Tennessee has outsourced most of its contact tracing to a medical billing company with no experience in epidemiology.
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