What Is Contact Tracing?

  • [Heitmeyer family photo]

    [Heitmeyer family photo]

By Elke Heitmeyer with Patric Hedlund, TME

The president of the United States returned Monday from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with an active case of covid-19.

As President Trump waved from the White House balcony for a campaign video he released on Twitter, the reported covid-positive count rose to 19 people known to be close to the president and his advisors in the past few days.

What most of them have in common was attending crowded, largely unmasked gatherings of hundreds of people hosted by the president last week, one to introduce U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

The White House and the Center for Disease Control said they are not actively doing contact tracing of the outbreak or the people who attended.

Michelle Corson, spokesperson for the Kern County Department of Public Health, calls contact tracing “a cornerstone of public health.” It is used consistently in responding to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. “Since the beginning of the covid pandemic in Kern County,” Corson said, “we have had contact…(please see below to view full stories and photographs)

Photo captions:

My mother, Henni Heitmeyer, happy to be going home after three weeks in ICU and
three weeks in rehab, declared virus-free.

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This is part of the October 9, 2020 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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