A senior public health nurse has outlined the challenges faced by health workers conducting contact tracing in the field, a method key to preventing further local transmission of the dreaded new coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

The health official, whose name was withheld, was a participant in Wednesday’s Ministry of Health and Wellness COVID-19 virtual discussion.

Contact tracing is a technique used to identify the contacts of an individual infected with a virus, by asking about the person’s activities and the activities and roles of the people around them since the onset of illness. Contacts can be anyone who has been exposed to an infected person.

“It is very challenging because of the stigma that is associated with this disease,” the nurse, who was being quizzed by health and wellness minister, Dr Christopher Tufton, shared.

Since the onset of COVID-19 locally, reports have surfaced of increasing discrimination and threats against infected individuals.

Strong condemnation from the Government and those in authority has done little to reduce this, as fear heightens locally amid a surge in the number of COVID-19 cases.

“On Monday, we went out and we tried to find some persons. We went to the home of one of the contacts and we were told that she wasn’t there. So we keep on asking and we found the grandmother of the person. We asked her to ask her granddaughter to call us — so you can imagine how intricate that becomes. Then the person [contact] called us to say she gave that address because she didn’t want anybody to know that she is being sought out by the Ministry of Health, because they will discriminate against her, they might burn down her house, and she had a lot of challenges,” the nurse relayed.

She said, to protect the contact, health workers had to identify a central point at which to conduct the required interview.

“So the concern we have, Sir, is the discrimination that is out there. It is real, and persons are afraid. When we go into some communities, persons will say, ‘Who in here have COVID? Is who unnu come for?’ — that sort of a thing,” the nurse divulged, confirming that individuals often hide from health authorities, causing a delay in the process.

The health practitioner said, as a result, health workers spend up to 12 hours per day in the field, hustling to locate contacts of an infected person.

She noted as well that, once the process of contact tracing begins for a person who has tested positive and who uses public transportation or operates in an open space, for example, health workers are looking at identifying a minimum of 20 people who the infected person would have likely come in contact with.

“The number [of contacts] might skyrocket so we are looking at 40, even 50 persons… It is a lot and we do it every day, including the weekend. Both holidays that just went by, we were in the field trying to find persons,” she said.

In the meantime, Chief Medical Officer Dr Jacquiline Bisasor-Mckenzie has said that three health care workers from the field have tested positive for the infectious disease.

Additionally, she said that seven workers from the ministry’s head office in Kingston, have also tested positive.

“All of these persons are doing quite well and we continue to monitor them on a daily basis. We have four persons that are in facilities right now, and they are doing well. We had one person that was moderately ill and that has improved quite significantly and is doing very well,” she said.