Contact tracing workforce: Driving equitable, sustained risk mitigation in a post-pandemic world

Contact tracing is an important public health tool for containing the spread of disease, including COVID-19. But contact tracers are effective only if they can persuade people to answer questions about recent whereabouts and who else might have been exposed. Contact tracers are more likely to be successful in their outreach if they and the people they are contacting have similar backgrounds. Currently, no one collects and reports information on the composition of the COVID-19 workforce in communities across the country, making it difficult to know whether the workforce could be more effective with focused recruitment strategies. However, a partnership between Mathematica and the Public Health Foundation sheds light on who is engaged in contact tracing during the pandemic and how their backgrounds compare with the backgrounds of people in their local communities. (author introduction)