L.A. County's contact-tracing system has repeatedly failed to alert officials to outbreaks at workplaces, allowing COVID-19 to continue to spread.
One by one workers at the Farmer John pork processing plant began getting sick with the coronavirus in March.
The county’s program, designed for swift identification of those swept up by the pandemic, has been throttled time and again by slow turnaround times for test results from labs, language barriers and uncooperative patients who provide inaccurate or incomplete information, most significantly about their workplaces, officials said. Many of those getting sick are low-wage workers who fear financial ruin if they stop working and are too afraid of retaliation to report unsafe work conditions.
In an interview, Ferrer acknowledged her staff has scrambled to keep up as they race to respond to hundreds of outbreaks across the county from a virus that scientists are only still learning about. She called contact tracing “a valuable tool for slowing the spread of COVID-19” but said it “cannot and should not be expected to singlehandedly stop outbreaks in the workplace.”
The tracking is essentially a race against the clock. People who contract COVID-19 are most infectious two days before they first experience symptoms to ten days after, according to federal health officials. But the cases continued to spread unchecked, according to county documents. And the county’s contact tracers still didn’t find them.
Sharon Balter, director of county’s acute communicable disease control program, said the SoFi case showed how contact tracing cannot pinpoint an outbreak at a sprawling worksite like the stadium, where there are 3,000 construction workers who are employed by a myriad of subcontractors. The county immediately began investigating, but by then three people had died. More than 150 workers tested positive that same week.
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