As the number of coronavirus cases in India increases, authorities in different states are relying on contact tracing, a concept in epidemiology that involves tracing the number of people an infected person comes in contact with.

The idea behind contact tracing is to stop the outbreak by breaking the transmission chains.

What is Contact Tracing?

• Contact tracing is not a novel concept and has been used as a method to track cases of the Ebola virus in Africa.
• It is one of the methods of detecting an outbreak and the number of infected people.
• In 2014, when the first Ebola cases began to be reported in Sierra Leone, a contact tracing mechanism was devised.
• According to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the system in the district was able to identify 13 Ebola cases, which would have been overlooked otherwise.

Various steps involved

According to WHO contact tracing can be broken down into three steps:

1) Contact identification:

• This involves identifying the contacts of the infected person by asking about the person’s activities and those of people around them since the onset of illness.
• In the case of the first positive COVID-19 patient from Chandigarh for instance, a chain of 119 people was traced directly or indirectly to the patient.

2) Contact listing:

• This means listing all those people who came in contact with the infected person.
• Efforts should be made to identify every listed contact and to inform them of their contact status, what it means, the actions that will follow, and the importance of receiving early care if they develop symptoms.
• In some areas across India, authorities are releasing lists of those who are quarantined and are identifying their houses by putting quarantine posters in front of their houses.

3) Contact follow-up:

• This step involves regular follow-ups with all the contacts to monitor for symptoms and test for signs of infection.

Limitations of Contact Tracing

• Since everyone has many contacts, contact tracing is useful when there are only a few cases.
• At this point, in many countries, we have so many cases that everyone would be contacted. This is essentially the lockdown — everybody isolates.
• However, while a fifth of the world’s population is currently isolated and under lockdown, it may not be feasible to trace contacts of all the infected patients given the scale of the current outbreak.

Way forward

• While contact tracing is an important step during a disease outbreak, it is insufficient alone in controlling it, requiring other interventions.
• Rapid and effective contact tracing can reduce the initial number of cases, which would make the outbreak easier to control overall.
• Effective contact tracing and isolation could contribute to reducing the overall size of an outbreak or bringing it under control over a longer time period.

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