PHOENIX – It’s been a quiet day on Zoom for Kylie Boyd and Alexandra Shilen. Occasionally, some student volunteers pop into their online room to check in or ask a brief question, then pop back out to hit the phones.
On this fall afternoon, Boyd and Shilen are overseeing 13 volunteers who are calling residents in four Arizona counties to ask questions about COVID-19.
The group is executing two functions that health experts say are essential to preventing the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and eventually ending the pandemic: contacting people who have tested positive for the disease and tracking down anyone who may have been exposed.
Boyd and Shilen are coordinators for the SAFER team at the University of Arizona. For 15 years, the Student Aid for Field Epidemiology Response program has trained students to investigate public health crises.
Team members used to track local outbreaks of foodborne illnesses and monitor flu cases. Now they’re tackling a pandemic that has killed 1.5 million people across the globe.
“In the beginning, it was like 10 cases … and then it was 100, and then it was 200. And then you really started to feel the growing pains,” said Erika Austhof, a UArizona epidemiologist who leads SAFER’s call center.
Case investigations and contact tracing are key to fighting COVID-19. Investigations involve calling individuals who have tested positive to gather information about their illness, travel history and recent close contacts. Contact tracing is when exposed individuals are alerted and given guidance about how to get tested and potential self-isolation.
SAFER does both, and it’s just one of a slew of groups nationwide helping underfunded public health agencies with what has become a colossal effort. Since January, more than 14 million people in the U.S. have been infected.
Kristen Pogreba-Brown, an assistant professor of epidemiology at UArizona who leads SAFER, said volunteers who stepped up in the early days of the pandemic were vital in getting the work off the ground.
“We were just kind of running around with our hair on fire … and just having people say, ‘Tell me what you need help with,’ ‘We can help make phone calls,’ ‘I can help do this’ – that was extremely important in the very beginning,” Pogreba-Brown said.
In April, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimated that at least 100,000 new contact tracers would be needed in the U.S. to meet the demand caused by rising COVID-19 cases. But funding that many contact tracers would take billions of dollars.
Using funding provided through the CARES Act, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded more than $600 million to 64 jurisdictions, including Arizona, to help with testing, contact tracing and containment.
According to a survey conducted by Johns Hopkins and NPR, the United States had more than 50,000 contact tracers in October, the most since the pandemic was declared in March.
A measure pending in Congress calls for the creation of a National Public Health Corps, similar to AmeriCorps, that would leverage existing national service structures to deploy volunteers to communities to help fight COVID-19 by doing contact tracing and other work.
President-elect Joe Biden supports the idea. His transition plan calls for the hiring of at least 100,000 people to perform contact tracing, among other functions.
A spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Health Services said the agency has cross-trained about 600 people, both agency employees and employees of contractors, in case investigation and contact tracing. County public health departments employ staff for the same purposes.
Those investigators work in tandem with programs such as SAFER, with an aim to find and contact everyone who is infected or has been exposed to the coronavirus.
SAFER employs 46 people and has a team of more than 300 volunteers, all of whom are affiliated with the University of Arizona and the majority of whom are students. Faculty and staff at the university volunteer as well.
“We call ourselves a mini health department because we’re so large,” Boyd said.