Mike Segar/Reuters
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The Fund for Public Health in New York City is seeking contract tracers to identify and record people who have been in contact with individuals diagnosed with COVID-19.
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Bipartisan health experts recommended Congress spend $12 billion to hire an additional 180,000 contract tracing workers over the next 18 months.
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The job, which requires remote work, offers benefits and pays approximately $57,000 annually, according to the job posting.
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday said the city was looking to immediately hire 1,000 contact tracers.
The Fund for Public Health in New York City is looking for people to work as contract tracers as experts say the strategy is necessary for cities and states planning to relax social distancing orders. The position requires experience in a health-related field or some sort of “public health training.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls contract tracing “part of a multipronged approach” to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. It involves public health staff working “with a patient to help them recall everyone with whom they have had close contact during the timeframe while they may have been infectious.”
Those who have been in contact with an infected person are informed by the contact tracer, though they aren’t informed of who contracted the disease, according to the CDC.
The FPHNYC position offers a salary of $57,000 and the position offers benefits, according to the job posting. The contact tracers will be tasked with calling New Yorkers who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in order to determine who they had been in contact with prior to their diagnosis and provide follow-up instructions to infected people and their contacts related to quarantine, isolation, and symptom monitoring.
FPHNYC will provide all necessary equipment and high-speed internet so the tracers can effectively work from home, according to the job posting.
While the gig requires working remotely, preference is given to New York City residents. The contact tracers could eventually be asked to work from an on-site call center, the posting said. The job also may require in-person visits to investigate “congregate settings and selected cases and contacts.” The state of New York is still under Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “PAUSE” order, which closed non-essential businesses and mandated teleworking when possible.
The contact tracing call center will operate every day from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., according to the posting.
Those interested in applying can send an email with a resume and cover letter to the address listed in the job description.
Contact tracing is a key part of the larger picture into how experts say the US will begin to re-open businesses In a letter to Congress on Monday, bipartisan health experts recommended spending $12 billion — as part of a $45.6 billion package — to expand the contract-tracing workforce nationwide. They said the number of contract-tracing workers in the US needed to expand by 180,000 until a vaccine is available — some predict that might not be until 2022.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday the city is looking to immediately hire 1,000 new contact tracers. It’s not just New York that’s currently seeking applications for contact tracers. Partners in Health, a Boston-based healthcare nonprofit, is also hiring contract tracers to work remotely.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US’ top coronavirus expert, said in order to scale back mandated social distancing, states needed to be able to “identify, isolate, get out of circulation, and do adequate contact tracing.”
“The real proof of the pudding of the success of this reentry is how quickly and effectively you identify them, you get them out of circulation you give them care where needed and you do contract tracing so you don’t have the beginning of the peak,” Fauci said in an April 15 interview on NBC’s “Today.”
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