An update on contact tracing

As you know, contact tracing is the process of figuring out all the people who’ve come in recent contact with an individual who has a communicable disease. This helps us ensure people who are infected can be isolated and reduce the risk of them passing the virus along to others, making contact tracing one of our key tools in responding to the pandemic.

AHS teams have been working very hard to expand our contact tracing and case investigation capacity, and thanks to these efforts, we are seeing tremendous improvements. For example, AHS case investigators and contact tracers closed more than 21,800 investigations in January, the most investigations we’ve ever closed in a single month.

Joining me to tell us how this was accomplished are:

• Dr. David Strong, Lead Medical Officer of Health, Communicable Disease Control
• Maureen Devolin, Executive Director, Healthy Living, Provincial Population and Public Health.

David and Maureen discuss our contact tracer recruiting efforts, the innovative tools the contact tracing team uses, and how they are working to prevent the spread of variant strains of COVID-19.