New York officials say the state will no longer require local health departments to trace the contacts of new coronavirus cases, a practice that was once considered vital to slowing the spread of the virus but that has become increasingly difficult to sustain as the highly contagious Omicron variant fuels a deluge of cases. But officials in New York City, home to more than two-fifths of the state’s population, said they weren’t ready to give up trying.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a news conference on Tuesday that a sharp increase in cases across the state in the past few weeks had made it “almost impossible to do contact tracing the way we have been in the past.” And Dr. Mary Bassett, the state’s acting health commissioner, said the variant’s contagiousness and its short incubation period left “a very short window for intervention to disrupt transmission.”
“The big change for New Yorkers is that if you test positive, you should no longer expect a call from your health department,” Dr. Bassett said at the news conference.
During the process, people who have tested positive receive a call from their local health department to determine who they may have exposed so those people can also seek a test.
New York is not the first state to cut back on such efforts. Last week, Arkansas said that its health department would no longer trace contacts for adults, and would instead focus on children. Georgia said that contact tracing in schools would be optional. Massachusetts ended its contact-tracing program last month.
In South Africa, one of the first countries to identify Omicron, the government dropped contact tracing after cases skyrocketed, and said it would focus on vaccinations instead.
Dr. Gigi Gronvall, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that for health departments struggling to balance resources, vaccinations must be the priority. “The end game has to be vaccination and boosters for people who are already vaccinated,” Dr. Gronvall said, adding that to improve contact tracing, “you have to narrow the scope,” for example by focusing on groups that are most at risk.
Dr. Bill Hanage, an associate professor focusing on pathogen evolution at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that New York’s announcement on Tuesday was a reaction to “the sheer number of cases.”
“At some point, because the numbers of contacts are also growing exponentially along with the cases, it becomes a waste of resources,” he said of contact tracing. “Given the properties of Omicron, I am surprised they didn’t stop it already.”
Ms. Hochul said local health departments were free to continue contact tracing on their own, and in New York City, Dr. Ted Long, the executive director of the city’s contact-tracing program, said the effort would continue.
“Our mission ends when the pandemic does,” Dr. Long said in a statement on Tuesday night.
Dr. Dave Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner, noted in a statement on Tuesday that the city’s program helps New Yorkers who test positive to connect with isolation hotels and get access to meals and care packages. Through Tuesday, the program had delivered nearly 1.8 million meals to more than 200,000 residents who have had to quarantine with the virus, according to the city.
Dr. Gronvall said that in some cases, people who test positive may need to notify friends and co-workers themselves. “It may be an awkward conversation to do your own contact tracing and tell your friends,” she said. “But it’s more awkward to not have that conversation.”