SOUTH BEND — When a city of South Bend employee tested positive for the coronavirus last week, County-City Building workers and members of the general public wanted to know the infected worker’s department or floor.
Might they have had contact with the person, or might they have touched the same elevator buttons or door handles?
Insurance agent Ray Sandoval was leery about letting a city Water Works employee inside his Mayflower Road office to check his backflow preventer last Monday, the day before Mayor James Mueller announced the city employee’s diagnosis. Had he known a city worker had tested positive without knowing their department, he wouldn’t have let the person in, Sandoval said.
“I would have just said hey, do it some other time,” Sandoval said.
Likewise, when announcing Tuesday that “a member of the Walt Disney Elementary School community” had tested positive for the virus, Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp. Superintendent Jerry Thacker emailed parents to note he wasn’t allowed to identify the person, but he advised anyone who had been at the school March 11-13 to contact their medical providers.
Citing federal patient privacy laws, public health officials aren’t publicly identifying people who test positive for the virus that causes COVID-19. Instead, they’re asking the public to rest assured that they’ll be notified if they have had prolonged contact with the person, through a process called “contact tracing.”
It’s a “very labor-intensive” form of epidemiological detective work that’s been taken on by four St. Joseph County Health Department nurses, said Dr. Mark Fox, St. Joseph County’s deputy health officer. He explained the process:
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