Johns Hopkins offers free online course to train contact tracers
With the urgent need to limit the spread of COVID-19, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with Bloomberg Philanthropies, launched a free online course to help train a new cadre of contact tracers to reach and assist people exposed to the virus. Taking and passing this course will be a requirement for thousands of contact tracers being hired by the state of New York to fight the pandemic.
The new course, "COVID-19 Contact Tracing," is available for registration on the Coursera platform. The course highlights how contact tracing is a key component of a public health strategy to slow the spread of COVID-19 without large-scale shutdowns and stay-at-home orders.
"COVID-19 Contact Tracing" is available for free to anyone in the world. Register for the course at www.coursera.org.
Through presentations by expert faculty and role plays, the course teaches the basics of interviewing people diagnosed with COVID-19, finding their close contacts who might have been exposed, and providing them advice and support for self-quarantine. Contact tracing is a public health practice that has been successful in breaking the chain of transmission of other infectious diseases, including measles and tuberculosis.
The new course is open to anyone in the world, whether they are interested in becoming a contact tracer or just want to understand the process. Applicants in New York state will be invited to take the course after their application is reviewed and they pass an initial interview. The interview, followed by taking the course and passing the final assessment within 72 hours, will be required to be hired into the New York state program.
A recent report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School estimated that the current situation in the United States requires a new workforce of at least 100,000 contact tracers to limit the spread of COVID-19 and begin to reopen the economy.
"Controlling the spread of COVID-19 will require the hiring and training of a public health workforce in record time," said Joshua M. Sharfstein, vice dean for Public Health and Community Engagement at the Bloomberg School. "This introductory course provides a strong foundation in the core concepts of contact tracing, from how to talk to people about COVID-19 to key ethical principles."
The lead instructor of the course is Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School. Among other contributors to the class is Bloomberg School senior research associate Tolbert Nyenswah, who was the incident commander for the response to the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.
The contact tracing course, which takes six hours to complete, is divided into five sections or "modules."
The course covers:
• Basic information on the virus and COVID-19, including symptoms of infection and how the virus is transmitted
• Fundamentals of contact tracing, such as how to define a case, identify their contacts, and calculate how long a contact should isolate;
• Steps involved in investigating cases and tracing their contacts, including simulated scenes performed by professional actors who illustrate potential interactions that tracers may experience with infected individuals and their contacts
• Ethics of contact tracing, including balancing privacy and public health considerations, and examples of basic technology tools that can facilitate contact tracing, such as using text messaging for check-ins and reminders;
• Skills for effective communications in the tracing process, such as what it means to be an "active listener" and how to deal with common challenges that arise when investigating cases.
To learn more, visit hub.jhu.edu/2020/05/11/free-contact-tracing-course-johns-hopkins/.