November 26, 2020

A raging pandemic and a gridlocked Congress could upend President-elect Joe Biden’s plan to hire 100,000 public health workers to trace Covid-19’s spread, despite widespread agreement it’s needed to finally end the crisis.

Contact tracing will be essential even after Covid-19 vaccines become widely available, because not everyone will get shots and scattered outbreaks will continue to ripple across the country. Quickly identifying who’s been exposed to people with infections can guide efforts to stamp out new hot spots and break chains of transmission.

State and local health departments had fewer than 2,000 workers carrying out contact tracing before the Covid-19 outbreak. A hiring burst over the summer wasn’t nearly enough as once-isolated outbreaks blanketed the country. But building a federal army of disease trackers could cost billions of dollars — and won't come in time to slow the current wave that's led to more than a million new U.S. cases a week and left health officials largely in the dark about where the virus is spreading.

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