The University of Georgia spent the summer training more than two dozen students to be Covid-19 contact tracers — equipping them with a unique skill set that is in high demand.
An assistant dean in the college of public health created the eight-week, online course, and students loved it. One pre-law student told The Chronicle she was shocked by how much she suddenly cared about contact tracing.
But university leaders collectively shrugged.
It’s unfortunate that UGA really didn’t jump on that opportunity to have those students.
The university did not hire any of the 28 students who completed the course. In fact, the University of Georgia doesn’t hire contact tracers at all, even though the rate of new infections in the surrounding Athens-Clarke County community is now among the highest in the state. The job of contact tracing, the university contends, belongs solely to the state.
The county is averaging 128 cases per day, a stark increase from two weeks earlier, when it averaged 35 cases daily.
Athens had been enjoying a downward trend in cases until the university resumed classes on August 20. At the end of the first full week, the university reported 821 cases: 798 students, 19 staff members, and four faculty members. The region has two critical-care hospitals serving more than a dozen counties with just 70 intensive-care beds. It is ill-equipped to handle a large outbreak.
Pilar Sofia Corso, the pre-law student who was inspired by attending the contact-tracing class, took it upon herself to get hired by the Georgia Department of Public Health for a job that will put her new skills to use.
“We’re just a really knowledgeable group of people that could just so easily slip into a contact-tracer role, without really needing any training,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that UGA really didn’t jump on that opportunity to have those students.”
The university’s reluctance to tap this expertise — from one of its own classrooms — is emblematic of a larger issue that has plagued the state’s response to Covid:
Namely, Georgia lacks a sense of urgency. And that sluggish response is by design.
The University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents, whose members were appointed by three governors — all Republicans — has repeatedly pressured its colleges to ignore the pandemic’s glaring public-safety concerns. The state system initially refused to let its 26 member institutions require face masks in classrooms, backing down only after a public uproar and intense media scrutiny. Professors in Georgia are under pressure to maintain in-person classes — no matter how bad the virus spread becomes.
On the issue of contact tracing, the flagship campus in Athens, Ga., attributes its hands-off approach to the state’s division of powers.
Contact tracing is the legal responsibility of the Georgia Department of Public Health.
“Contact tracing is the legal responsibility of the Georgia Department of Public Health (GDPH),” Greg Trevor, a university spokesman, wrote in an email. “We have a very close working relationship with GDPH and have a designated UGA liaison to work directly with them. GDPH has assured us they can handle contact tracing in Northeast District 10, where UGA is located.”
Trevor said the state hired “several” university students over the summer as contact tracers, and he added that the institution is ready to train more should they be needed.
Other Georgia colleges have taken a more-aggressive approach to contact tracing — hiring in-house tracers while acknowledging the state health department’s leadership role.
The Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, has eight full-time staffers (and 30 volunteers) devoted to contact tracing. Kennesaw State University has “approximately 20 contact tracers,” according to a campus spokeswoman.
The University of Georgia, by contrast, merely collects students’ contact information through its DawgCheck app. The institution has an in-house “liaison” who then passes that information along to the state public health department, while serving as a point person to coordinate tracing efforts.
Grace Bagwell Adams, the assistant dean who designed and taught the contract-tracing course, said that upper administrators were routinely updated on the implementation and progress of the class. But her dean’s suggestion that the students be used for contact tracing went nowhere, she said. The university wanted to rely on the state.
State health officials, meanwhile, preferred to incorporate those students as potential candidates in their internship program, Adams said.
But while a few students from the class interned with the state — and a few appear to have been outright hired — the rest never got to use the specialized training they received.
“The College of Public Health at the University of Georgia wants to collaborate and wants to support and complement what the Department of Public Health is doing,” Adams said. “That offer is still on the table.”
A spokeswoman for the state’s public health department told The Chronicle that the agency does a good job at contact tracing.
After receiving a report of a positive coronavirus test, the agency “reaches out to the case within 24 hours,” said Nancy Nydam, the spokeswoman. The state then creates a list of close contacts, with the expectation of “a first outreach attempt for all contacts being done within 24 hours.”
The College of Public Health ... wants to support and complement what the Department of Public Health is doing. That offer is still on the table.
But Nydam acknowledged temporary backlogs in the system, which she attributed to providers who “do not submit results in real time or on a daily basis but instead submit batched results from several days’ or weeks’ worth of testing.”
The department is hiring additional contact tracers. Corso, the pre-law student, has her job orientation this week.
At the University of Georgia, questions linger — and not just about whether a contract-tracing opportunity was wasted.
Jasmin Elphic, a freshman who tested positive for Covid-19 last month, told The Chronicle that she wants greater transparency. The University of Georgia reports its positive test results weekly, for example, while many other colleges post daily results.
“People in our hall will test positive, they won’t tell you, even though we all share bathrooms,” Elphic said. “It’s kind of like if they don’t talk about it, maybe it doesn’t seem as widespread and as big.”
The university relocated Elphic to an apartment-style quarantine dorm, where she experienced only mild symptoms, similar to having a cold.
But it was still a stressful situation. She said that the contact tracing call from the state, which she received five days after her positive result, was “just a really nice phone call, it really just felt very informative.”
The woman on the other end of the line asked about her quarantine conditions, Elphic said, and what food she was receiving. The state worker offered to give Elphic a timeline for leaving quarantine safely and when to get retested.
The freshman, a public-health major, said that she knows of three of her 17 contacts who received phone calls from the state. But at least two contacts were not called. The value of additional staffing is obvious, she said.
“Having more people and more resources would help out, because a lot of people just want answers,” Elphic said. “It’s kind of, like, a no-brainer, you know?”
