Northern Health adapts contact tracing method following surge in COVID-19 cases

Northern Health is experiencing pressure from the recent surge in lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the region.

According to Northern Health, the number of new people testing positive for the virus is impacting public health‘s ability to quickly contact people who have tested positive.

There is now a backlog of people who have tested positive but haven’t been contacted by public health yet.

The Health Authority is now deploying additional staff to its case and contact management teams.

Additionally, changes are being made to how cases are notified, monitored, and cleared from self-isolation, to clear the backlog and speed up the process in the future.

Northern Health explained that everyone who tests positive will receive a call as soon as possible and anyone who receives a message with a positive result should self-isolate with anyone in their household immediately.

Additionally, rapid options for receiving results (text or SMS) means they may come well before a call from public health, which could take up to 4-5 days.

The health authority is shifting to gathering information on and notifying, close contacts only in certain situations.

Close contacts include health care workers, those in long-term care; cases related to industrial projects, those in First Nations communities and those that are part of a known cluster or outbreak.

The change is to ensure public health can respond quickly to developing clusters of cases or potential outbreaks for those that are most vulnerable.

Public health will be also be reducing the frequency of calls to people in self-isolation after testing positive for COVID-19, and not all people who are self-isolating will receive daily monitoring calls.