States are eager to open up and get people back to work, but how do they do that without risking new coronavirus flare-ups? Public health leaders widely agree that communities need to ramp up capacity to test, trace and isolate. The idea behind this public health mantra is simple: Keep the virus in check by having teams of public health workers — epidemiologists, nurses, trained citizens — identify new positive cases, track down their contacts and help both the sick person and those who were exposed isolate themselves.

This is the strategy that has been proven to work in other countries, including China, South Korea and Germany. For it to work in the U.S., states and local communities will need ample testing and they'll need to expand their public health workforce. By a lot.

An influential group of former government officials released a letter Monday calling for a contact tracing workforce of 180,000. Other estimates of how many contact tracers are needed range from 100,000 to 300,000.States are eager to open up and get people back to work, but how do they do that without risking new coronavirus flare-ups? Public health leaders widely agree that communities need to ramp up capacity to test, trace and isolate. The idea behind this public health mantra is simple: Keep the virus in check by having teams of public health workers — epidemiologists, nurses, trained citizens — identify new positive cases, track down their contacts and help both the sick person and those who were exposed isolate themselves.

This is the strategy that has been proven to work in other countries, including China, South Korea and Germany. For it to work in the U.S., states and local communities will need ample testing and they'll need to expand their public health workforce. By a lot.

An influential group of former government officials released a letter Monday calling for a contact tracing workforce of 180,000. Other estimates of how many contact tracers are needed range from 100,000 to 300,000. [more]

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield outlined the agency's "contact tracing" strategy in an interview with NPR, as states scramble to prepare for reopening. [snip]

[interview...]

CHANG: All right. Well, going back to you really briefly, Rob, how do the CDC's efforts so far match up with what other public health experts would like to see?

STEIN: Well, what I'm hearing is that it's a start, but they are really saying that it really falls far short. The CDC is only talking about directly deploying hundreds of workers, and the country probably needs tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these contact tracers. And, you know, it's a huge gamble to think we have all summer to get this together. New waves of outbreaks could easily erupt at any time and quickly overwhelm health departments. And the big missing piece of this...

CHANG: All right.

STEIN: ...Is testing. We don't have enough testing.

CHANG: That is NPR health correspondent Rob Stein and health policy reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin.

Obama aides, in op-eds and essays ripping the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus, officially called COVID-19, have pointed to the Jan. 13, 2017, session as a key example of their effort to press the importance of pandemic preparedness to their successors.

KFDM 6 News is reporting that Jefferson County District Attorney Pat Knauth has confirmed that an investigation will be launched into Beaumont Mayor Becky Ames recently receiving service at a nail shop, which was captured in a photo and then provided to the media.

Knauth said that the investigation comes at the request of Jefferson County Judge Jeff Brannick and they will try to determine whether there is a criminal case, and when or whether they’ll be able to assemble a jury.

According to Knauth, the case will be turned over to an unspecified law enforcement agency for impartiality and they will be charged with determining if any criminal conduct occurred, whether by Ames, or, The Nail Bar on Old Dowlen Road.

Currently, all nail and hair businesses statewide are ordered closed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in an attempt to stop the spread of Coronavirus. State officials say a violation, if followed by a conviction, could result in a fine of up to $2,000.00 and a jail term up to 6 months.

The larger threat to Americans' privacy, however, may be rooted less in the current crisis, than in the country's lack of a comprehensive laws that protect data in the first place, according to Bowman. The U.S., he notes, has a hodgepodge of laws when it comes to health and children's privacy, which creates many gaps. It's also unclear what laws apply to which companies. For instance, there's uncertainty whether the federal health privacy law, HIPAA, applies to the likes of Google while, when it comes to data collection, phone carriers are subject to more stringent rules than tech companies.

The upshot is what the U.S. may need most is not specific measures to prevent misuse of health data during the current outbreak, but federal legislation that creates overarching privacy regulation such as already exists in places like Canada and Europe. Ironically, Congress was negotiating the details of such a law before the pandemic broke out and legislators became consumed with the crisis. Now, champions of the law, including Rep. DelBene, are pushing to ensure the project doesn't fall between the cracks.

Says Rep. DelBene, who is pushing for privacy even as her home state of Washington faces some of the heaviest toll from the outbreak: "We need to continue to realize what a critical priority this is. Other parts of the world are taking this seriously. We need a federal standard."