By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Reno County Health Department Director Nick Baldetti says that professionals in his office are the only ones doing contact tracing right now.
"Reno County has not hired any external case contact tracers," Baldetti said. "All of that work is done right now, at the Health Department, by either an academically trained epidemiologist who, their actual schooling, their bachelor's and master's degree work is in disease gestation and investigation, as well as clinical professionals, generally nursing staff."
It wouldn't take that many cases to overwhelm the current staff, however.
"Near the beginning of this process, we were looking at, kind of, modeling," Baldetti said. "We thought it was reasonable to have, if we had three to four active cases, with the expectation of ten to twelve contacts for each one of those active cases, that might be somewhere in the realm of, kind of maxing out. If those ten to twelve are direct, high exposure contacts, we need to make contact almost daily. You can see how that exponentiates pretty quickly."
The concern expressed in legislation was that community members may have to be enlisted to do some contact tracing and they wouldn't be familiar with the privacy requirements typical in medicine.
"Reno County Health Department does have one trained epidemiologist," Baldetti said. "We also have, at minimum, five overflow nurses. It would have to be quite a spike in terms of the activity we've had so far."
As of Friday morning, there are only two active cases in the county and they are related.