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Dr. Stephanie Silvera Noted Importance of Contact Tracing for AZCentral.com

Posted in: College News and Events

Arizona Central event space for AZCentral

Dr. Stephanie Silvera, Professor in the Public Health Department, noted the importance of contact tracing during the coronavirus crisis for AZCentral.com. The news outlet reported on an Arizona event with hundreds of attendees, with one being a coronavirus patient. After two weeks, the other guests were not made aware of this. The article stated: “‘It can actually be good in decreasing the spread of the disease especially in the early stages of an outbreak,’ said Stephanie Silvera, an epidemiologist and professor of public health at Montclair State University in New Jersey. ‘One of the big challenges, I would say, is that it can be pretty expensive, and so it is a lot of work to track down everyone and identify who they are.’

But Silvera said the two Tucson bridge tournaments are examples of where contact tracing could take much less time because the exposure was at a specific place and time and it would be easy to get a list of everyone who attended. Contact tracing for a public place like a mall would be much more difficult because there isn’t a list of everyone who was there.

‘You should be able to get that list and quickly reach out to those individuals and tell them to self-quarantine for both groups and ideally have them reach out to their friends and family who they have been in contact with since that time,’ Silvera said.”