State to end contact tracing; local boards of health to pick up the slack

As the state’s COVID-19 contact tracing program is set to come to a close at the end of the year, Cambridge and several other communities are joining forces to have their own program.

The MA Community Tracing Collaborative, in the early days of the pandemic, helped local public health departments with contact tracing as the pandemic ramped up in April 2020, according to a statement from a state Executive Office of Health and Human Services spokesperson. 

“At that time, there was limited testing capability, minimal therapeutic interventions and no vaccines,” the statement said. “Today, Massachusetts is a national leader in vaccine administration and free testing, and the second lowest COVID hospitalization rate and case positivity rates in the nation. To date, over 1 million cases and contacts have been identified for follow up conducted by local health departments and the CTC.”

But with the way the pandemic has changed over the last year-and-a-half, the state is planning to phase out the program by the end of the year.

“To prepare for this transition, the Administration has awarded over $15 million in federal and state resources to local boards of health to build local capacity for case investigations and contact tracing, and the Department of Public Health is preparing to award an additional $4 million to boards of health for these efforts,” the statement said.

For Cambridge, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop, the communities plan to hire several contact tracers and case investigators who will help the four municipalities, according to Cambridge Public Health Department spokesperson Susan Feinberg in a statement.

“In addition, the group will be assisted by a number of care resource coordinators and technical assistance from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council,” she wrote.

From April 2020 until now, the state program and local public health departments have traced and found contacts for 1.1 million COVID-19 cases, with over 2.6 million phone calls going out to cases and their contacts. About 35 percent were done by local boards of health. More than 713,000 COVID-19 cases and contacts were identified by the CTC contact tracers, and 82 percent of that outreach was completed.

The CTC will no longer take new cases as of Nov. 30.

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