Contact Tracing Brings Uptick In County Coronavirus Cases

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Aggressive work to locate and test county residents who’ve been exposed to coronavirus patients has yielded Sonoma County’s largest single day rise in positive tests.

Supervisor Lynda Hopkins confirmed Thursday that 14 of the 16 positive tests revealed on Wednesday were of patients who had been tested as a result of contact tracing. That work involved locating and testing people who had been exposed to the virus by known positive COVID-19 individuals. Of 18 such tests performed said Hopkins, 14 came back positive.

As of Thursday the county had recorded 136 total coronavirus cases, with 83 considered active, 52 patients recovered, with one death.

At her Thursday afternoon briefing, county Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase confirmed that finding new cases through contact tracing was an expected development, and in fact a large number of the new cases being found across the county are discovered in this manner. She added it was a good sign that very few community transmission cases were now being discovered, confirming that stay-at-home orders were working.

Sonoma County, along with others across California, has pledged to scale up contact tracing to locate, and quarantine anyone who has been exposed unknowingly and is active in the community. Finding those who’ve been infected with the virus is widely considered to be a key technique, along with social distancing, in controling community spread of the virus.

It was not revealed how may of those who tested positive had symptoms, and how many were asymptomatic.

The state of California is also pressing forward with widespread antibody testing. That effort, using a test developed by Stanford Medicine, is expect to be ramping up in the next few weeks. Through antibody testing, health officers will be able to determine who has been exposed the virus and has developed antibodies which would make them immune to further infection. It is increasingly believed by researchers that the coronavirus may have been circulating in many places in the U.S. weeks before the first patient was confirmed through testing.

This technique is considered a critical tool, along with more widespread testing of the public, to determine when stay-at-home orders can be relaxed.