Landmark Covid-19联络跟踪项目与成千上万的圣安东尼奥居民联系

在9月底，乌西顿休斯顿公共卫生学院打电话给居民两年零数十万，乌西顿休斯顿公共卫生学院在圣安东尼奥举行了COVID-19联络跟踪计划。该项目是与圣安东尼奥市大都会卫生部门的合作伙伴关系。Metro Health与学校签约以开发脚本和协议；雇用和培训案件调查员，也称为接触示踪剂；并进行了一项广泛的行动，最终持续了比早期预测更长的时间，并达到了数十万贝克萨尔县居民。

Jack Tsai, PhD, took over as dean of the school’s 40-year-old San Antonio campus in 2020 right before the pandemic began.

“Over the past two years, we have proudly worked alongside Metro Health to lead COVID-19 contact tracing for residents of the City of San Antonio,” Tsai said. “As a city, we were able to persevere together through the largest pandemic of our time.”

Anita Kurian, MBBS, MPH, DrPH, deputy director of Metro Health, said she chose to work with UTHealth Houston School of Public Health for the project so that the city would have a group of qualified contact tracers with public health backgrounds.

“我是100%的相信这种伙伴关系be very productive and effective in assisting us with this response to the pandemic,” Kurian said. “The basic knowledge was there. We didn’t have to explain the basic concept of contact tracing.”

From Sept. 2020 through Sept. 2022, the school’s San Antonio campus, with funding support from Metro Health, employed more than 200 residents of San Antonio to serve as case investigators or contact tracers of COVID-19 exposure. The UTHealth Houston team handled over 650,000 COVID-19 cases and made over 300,000 calls to residents of San Antonio, ultimately reaching over 200,000 residents.

Kurian said the general public may not have heard of contact tracing before, but in the world of public health, it is a well-established first line of defense.

“Contact tracing is the protocol for the early days of an outbreak or a pandemic,” Kurian said. “We were hoping to stop or slow the spread by identifying the cases and contacts quickly.”

Marilu Vazquez was one of the program managers for the campus who worked on the project from beginning to end. She said during the long and sometimes exhausting days working on the project she drew inspiration from the words of one of the operations managers, who often told the team, “You individually won’t be in the history books, but you’ve all been part of history.”

As a Spanish speaker, Vazquez said she often handled calls to the Spanish-speaking residents and found they were usually very happy to hear a voice in their own language. During the height of the pandemic, providing a listening ear to so many residents who were suffering both physically and emotionally became an important part of the job.

Vazquez said she will always remember some calls, like the time she talked to a 16-year-old boy who had just lost his dad that same day to COVID-19. His mom had died of the disease three months before.

“这让我有眼泪，”瓦兹克斯说。“人们会祝福我。我可能每天有20个人说：“上帝保佑您为您所做的工作。”对我来说，在100年大流行中曾经是一次曾经的前线是非常满意的。成为我一生的荣誉是其中的一部分。”

Valuable information was collected through the contact tracing project that helped local leaders better understand how to handle and treat this brand-new disease. For instance, Vazquez said it was contact tracing that helped the public health community realize that COVID-19 was associated with patients losing their sense of taste and smell.

“We were contributing to science, evidence-based information,” Vazquez said. “It was not just talk, it was actual evidence.”

阿什利·洛佩兹（Ashley Lopez）是两年来从事该项目的接触示踪剂之一。大流行开始后，她刚刚毕业于公共卫生学士学位。

洛佩兹说：“当我在2020年5月毕业时，没有很多工作空缺，因为很多地方都关闭了。”“我看到这个[接触跟踪]是一种在大流行期间提供帮助并利用我的知识和背景的方式。”

她说她发现这项工作有意义和重要。她作为接触示踪剂的一部分工作是为个人提供有关重要测试和治疗服务的知识。她说，起初，居民通常对与她交谈非常持怀疑态度，但是当她开始提供有关服务的真正帮助和信息时，她说他们经常在通话结束时真正感谢她。

“It made me feel good inside when I was able to help,” Lopez said. “It’s empowering when you can educate someone, especially in certain communities where they have never heard about these things.”

库里安说，今年该计划开始逐渐减少，因为该病毒正在流行，疫苗很容易获得，并且对疾病的了解更为普遍。她说，Metro Health现在专注于预防策略，并确保受感染者不会遭受不利结果。

库里安说：“我总是说，我真诚地相信，大流行和其他危机是进步的机会，但这取决于我们的行动。”“我们在当地的公共卫生部门中发挥了领导作用，我们在社区中发展和利用伙伴关系的能力变得非常重要。对我而言，与公共卫生学院的这种合作伙伴关系是我们如何有效发展，利用和维持社区关系的一个典型例子。学校允许我们得到更加协调和足智多谋的公共卫生反应。”