Contact Tracing

Minimum standards are recorded in this spreadsheet. The current minimum standards for Contact Tracing are:

• Wearable contact tracing technology will be required while on base. 

• Contact tracing logs will be recorded in Salesforce for work hours.

• Personal contact tracing logs will be recorded for time spent within the community.

Contact tracing is highly likely to become an essential function used to control the spread of COVID-19 in many parts of the world.

The aim of contact tracing is to reach out to anyone who has been in “close contact” with a person who has been confirmed to have COVID-19. We should anticipate that, within the first 14 days of someone's arrival that they may be told to isolate. 

The CDC define a close contact as: 

“A close contact is defined as someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 48 hours before illness onset (or, for asymptomatic clients, 10 days prior to positive specimen collection) until the time the patient is isolated.”

Our risk assessment (section B) highlighted two specific risks which require us to reduce close contacts. 1. Exposure from proximity to another (“close contact”). 2. Isolation orders from external Contract Tracing.

Without a better solution, we rely on bubbles, physical restrictions and good behavior to reduce close contacts. The only verification that these things are in place will be observation. There are concerns that this level of oversight will create an increased likelihood of conflict between parties on the Program.

To reduce this conflict whilst still managing the risk, we aim to make each person accountable for their own actions.  This can be accomplished using technology. 

Close Contact Technology 

We are currently researching wearable technology to monitor close-contacts within our environment. This type of technology will mean that we can report upon who has been in close contact with who.

This means that, if a person is required to isolate (such as by an external contact tracer), we can use technology to see who that person has been in close contact with in the past 14 days and quarantine just those individuals, opposed to having to quarantine their whole bubble, or even the entire base, if the integrity of the individual bubble was not maintained.

This makes each individual accountable for their own behavior - i.e. if someone chooses to follow safe behaviors, they will not be quarantined just because others did not. 

Of course, we should, as far as is practicable, still provide the other controls in order to provide an environment where safe behaviors are enabled and promoted, but the level of oversight is greatly reduced, reducing the potential for conflict. 

Manual process

• We are adapting Salesforce work log tracking to cater for who works together in a team & which homeowner (if any) was present at the worksite. 

We should reduce the opportunities for close-contact with a beneficiary, or the community. We will need to  manually keep track of close-contacts within the Community and contact them, should one of our team become a suspected case. All individuals on-program should be encouraged to personally keep a log of any close contacts they have had in the community. It is recommended that each program provide volunteers with a personal notebook to help promote this. 

We can only offer supported isolation to our own team. It is vital that great care is taken to not potentially expose others. 

We will develop a group of people who can complete the contact tracing for any individuals who are no longer on program.