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According to a spokesperson for the health authority, the Saskatchewan Health Authority is recruiting retirees and volunteers to help with contact tracing investigations.
SHA has more than 350 employees trained in contact tracing, the spokesperson said. But as COVID-19 cases and the number of close contacts increase, investigations take longer to conduct.
So the health authority is recruiting more contact tracers, including retirees and volunteers, in anticipation of a potential increase in cases.
“Our contact tracking system is certainly under pressure,” Health Authority CEO Scott Livingstone said at a news conference Thursday.
“A single positive case each day provides hours of work for the contact trackers over the two-week period,” after a positive result, he said. “But that job can grow exponentially if you take into account the number of contacts.”
As of Thursday, Saskatchewan recorded an average of 214 new cases of COVID-19 per day over a two-week period. Each case had an average of about seven or eight close contacts, which creates 32,000 total working hours over the two-week period, Livingstone said.
He noted that the average number of contacts has dropped slightly from the past few weeks, but the health authority is planning an effective contact-tracing strategy in case the province approaches 450 cases per day.
At the onset of the pandemic, the provincial government authorized retired nurses to obtain emergency licenses through the Saskatchewan Registered Nurses Association, the province’s regulatory body for nurses. The most recent license was released on Thursday.
The association is working with health authorities on the workforce level and shares its list of emergency practice licenses each week with SHA “and other employers,” a spokesperson for the association said.
Once nurses retire, they are no longer part of the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses. But if an emergency license is issued, they are temporarily unionized, SUN President Tracy Zambory said.
“It is only extremely important that resources are allocated [contact tracing] that requires, “he said.
“It’s about the resumption of health services and the withdrawal of some of the slower areas so that human resources can be freed up to be able to help in finding contacts.”
‘Real consequences’
Contact tracing aims to identify cases of COVID-19 before they can unknowingly spread the disease throughout the community, explains Dr. Cory Neudorf, a public health physician and professor of community health and epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan.
Finding close contacts means they can isolate themselves and be tested first.
“Break that chain of transmission and you can start managing the pandemic,” he said.
The health authority’s announcement that contact tracing investigations are taking longer means Saskatchewan residents are not following public health rules as closely as they should be, or that COVID positive people are visiting public spaces , says Neudorf.
Time-consuming investigations can also make it more difficult to find contacts and curb the spread of COVID-19, because people may forget who they met and where they went over time, he said.
But the strain on contact tracing also has consequences for the general health system, Livingstone said Thursday.
A finite number of workers are trained to track contacts, so some health workers have been moved to the health system to conduct investigations. But that’s just a Band-Aid solution, says Neudorf.
“As the epidemic progresses and we start getting many cases of COVID-19 in hospital, those workers need to be brought back to care for COVID positive patients,” he said. “You can’t use the same things for both purposes, so it’s just a short-term solution.”
Redeployment of staff also causes disruptions in other health services, he added.
Saskatchewan residents can help reduce the length of contact tracing investigations by going out in public for only essential reasons, regardless of what the province’s public health regulations allow, to reduce the number of close contacts, Neudorf said.
When people go out, they should pay attention to physical distances and wear a mask, he added.
Neudorf also suggests keeping a weekly list of where you go, who you see and when, especially if you have to be in public often. Such lists help trackers to easily trace contacts, should a person test positive.
As of Friday, 2,237 cases of COVID-19 in Saskatchewan are being investigated by public health officials.
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