Santa Clara County alone needs army of coronavirus contact tracers

Santa Clara County needs to hire an army of 1,000 people, roughly double the size of its current public health department, to properly investigate and contain every new coronavirus case once the Bay Area finally emerges from sheltering in place.

But it’s labor-intensive work, requiring hours of phone interviews and daily check-ins for all infected people and their contacts. Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he’d like to add 20,000 people to the state’s contact-tracing programs to keep on top of the outbreak. Nationwide, public health experts have said the U.S. will need hundreds of thousands of contact tracers.

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