Local governments ‘overwhelmed’ in race to trace US COVID contacts

From the article:

The United States badly lags other wealthy countries in contact tracing, including South Korea and Germany, which ramped up their programs months ago. Contributing to the faltering U.S. response is the government’s failure to provide accurate and timely diagnostic testing, something other countries were able to roll out much faster and more broadly.

On Alabama’s hard-hit Gulf Coast, health department staffers are stretched so thin they are directing individuals who test positive to notify any contacts themselves, said Rendi Murphree, director of Mobile County’s Bureau of Disease Surveillance and Environmental Services.

“Everything is overwhelmed,” she said.

Adding to the challenge has been a sharp politicization of the COVID-19 response, with many Americans, from President Donald Trump on down, often portraying mask-wearing and other measures as an infringement of personal liberty.

The United States has by far the world’s largest COVID-19 caseload, with over 4.6 million confirmed infections and more than 155,000 deaths. Yet public health measures during the pandemic have been largely decentralized, coming down to patchwork efforts by state, and especially local, governments. Federal funding has proved unreliable, caught up in fierce debate over the crisis.