Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

8 INFECTION CONTROL US will need up to 100,000 contact tracers by September, CDC says By Anuja Vaidya T he U.S. needs to significantly increase its number of coronavirus contact tracers, as there will be a need for up to 100,000 of them by September, CDC Director Robert Red- field, MD, told House members June 4, according to The New York Times. At a health subcommittee hearing, Dr. Redfield said there are about 600 CDC workers nation- wide interviewing people infected with the new coronavirus to find out who they may have come into contact with and identifying potential new cases. Many states have hired their own contract tracers. As of early June, some states had hired more than 1,000. But the country will need more. "It is fundamental that we have a fully operational contact-tracing workforce that can — every single case, every single cluster — can do comprehensive contact-tracing within 24 to 36 hours, 48 hours at the latest, get it completed, get it isolated, so that we can stay in containment mode as we get into the fall and winter," Dr. Redfield said in the Times report. The number of contact tracers each state will need will vary, he said, and the CDC is helping states determine the workforce they will need. n COVID-19 will circulate for decades, experts predict By Mackenzie Bean C OVID-19 will likely persist for decades, even after a vaccine is created and widely disseminated, experts told The Washington Post. Many vaccine, epidemiology and disaster planning experts said they believe COVID-19 will become an endemic disease similar to HIV or chickenpox. Four other types of coronaviruses already circulate the globe and cause the common cold. Some experts predict SARS-CoV-2 will become the fifth, eventually posing milder health risks as immunity increases. "This virus is here to stay," Sarah Cobey, PhD, an epidemiol- ogist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, told the Post. "The question is, how do we live with it safely?" Experts said leaders must start thinking about long-term solutions for COVID-19, instead of focusing on short-term crisis management. They said the first priority should be developing more sophisticated testing and data management strategies for the virus. COVID-19 may also require lasting changes to many aspects of everyday life, according to the experts. For example, cities may want to implement automatic doors and touch-free crosswalk buttons to promote hand hygiene, according to Dr. Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University. Families may need to get routine COVID-19 tests before visiting elderly loved ones, and employers may need to abandon open floor plans for cubicles. n Antibiotic use high in US hospitals in 2016, 2017 By Anuja Vaidya P atients received antibiotics in about two-thirds of hos- pitalizations in a two-year period beginning January 2016, leading researchers to conclude that U.S. inpatient antibiotic use "remains high," according to a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. The study examined antibiotic use among adult patients at 576 U.S. hospitals. They gathered data from hospitals in the Premier Healthcare Database between Jan. 1, 2016, and Dec. 31, 2017. The study included data on about 11 million hospital stays. In 65 percent of hospital stays, patients received antibiotics. Broad-spectrum antibiotic agents were used most often. The study also revealed teaching hospitals averaged lower rates of total antibiotic use than nonteaching ones. n COVID-19 does not easily spread via contaminated surfaces, CDC says By Gabrielle Masson T he CDC updated its website in May to clarify that the novel coronavirus "does not spread easily" on surfaces or objects. Previously, the CDC said it "may be possible" to spread the virus via contaminated surfaces, but the agency now believes it is primarily spread through the respiratory droplets of people in close contact. "COVID-19 is a new disease and we are still learn- ing about how it spreads," the CDC webpage read. "It may be possible for COVID-19 to spread in other ways, but these are not thought to be the main ways the virus spreads." n

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