As countries restart, WHO warns about lack of virus tracing

A top world health official Monday warned that countries are essentially driving blind in reopening their economies without setting up strong contact tracing to beat back flare-ups of the coronavirus.

The warning came as France and Belgium emerged from lockdowns, the Netherlands sent children back to school, and a number of U.S. states continued to lift their business restrictions.

Fears of infection spikes in countries that have loosened up have been borne out in recent days in Germany, where new clusters were linked to three slaughterhouses; in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the crisis started; and in South Korea, where a single nightclub customer was linked to 85 new cases.

Authorities have warned that the scourge could come back with a vengeance without widespread testing and tracing of infected people’s contacts with others.

Health officials in the U.S. will be watching closely in the coming days for any resurgence of the virus two weeks after states began gradually reopening, and efforts to assemble contact-tracing teams are underway there and in Europe.

The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan, said that robust contact tracing measures adopted by Germany and South Korea provide hope that those countries can detect and stop virus clusters before they get out of control.

But he said the same is not true of other countries exiting their lockdowns, declining to name specific countries.

"Shutting your eyes and trying to drive through this blind is about as silly an equation as I’ve seen," Ryan said. "And I’m really concerned that certain countries are setting themselves up for some seriously blind driving over the next few months."

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More than 10,000 people are involved in contact tracing in Germany, a country of 83 million, or about one-quarter the size of the United States. Other countries are behind. Britain, for example, abandoned an initial contact-tracing effort in March when the virus’s rapid spread made it impossible. Now it is recruiting 18,000 people to do the legwork of tracking contacts.

U.S. states and European countries are also developing contact-tracing cellphone apps that can show whether someone has crossed paths with an infected person.

In the hardest-hit corner of the U.S., contact tracers in New York began online training Monday, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo said some upstate areas, including the Finger Lakes, could ease their restrictions after Friday.

The governor set a requirement of 30 contact tracers per 100,000 residents for areas to reopen. That translates to about 6,000 workers statewide, performing what Cuomo as "a logistical nightmare, never been done before."

Meantime, a new study indicates that New York City’s death toll from the coronavirus may be thousands of fatalities worse than the official tally.

Between mid-March and early May, about 24,000 more people died in the city than researchers would ordinarily expect during that time of year, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis. That is about 5,300 more deaths than previously attributed to the virus during that period.

These "excess deaths" could have been caused indirectly by the outbreak, including demands on the health system that could have delayed lifesaving care for other health problems, the report said.

Contract tracing across the rest of the U.S. is a patchwork of approaches and readiness levels. States are scrambling to hire and train tracers. Health experts say the country will need hundreds of thousands of them.

Another new CDC report showed how difficult and time-consuming it is to track virus cases. The analysis of California efforts in the early days of the U.S. outbreak found that contacting travelers from China and Iran consumed nearly 1,700 hours of time by local jurisdictions and still didn’t stop the introduction of the virus to the state.

In loosening up the country’s lockdown, German authorities have spelled out a specific level of infection that could lead to the reimposition of restrictions in local areas. Other countries — and U.S. states — have been vague about what would be enough to trigger another clampdown.

The U.S. has seen 1.3 million confirmed infections and about 80,000 deaths, the most in the world by far, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, 4 million people have been reported infected and more than 280,000 have died, over 150,000 of them in Europe. Health experts believe all those numbers understate the true toll of the outbreak.

With Monday’s partial reopening in France, c rowds formed at some Paris metro stations, but the city’s notorious traffic jams were absent. Only half the stores on the Champs-Elysees were open.

Parisian hairdressers planned to charge a fee for the disposable protective gear they will have to give customers. Walk-ins will be a thing of the past, said Brigitte L’Hoste, manager of the Hair de Beauté salon.

"The face of beauty will change, meaning clients won’t come here to relax. Clients will come because they need to," said Aurelie Bollini, a beautician at the salon. "They will come and aim at getting the maximum done in the shortest time possible."

Across the Atlantic, hair salons in Florida contended with tight regulations and pent-up demand as they reopened across much of the state, save for some hard-hit areas. The Fringe Salon in Naples was already booked for the entire week, its capacity limited by the social-distancing rules.

"It’s just pure chaos. Everybody’s excited about getting their haircut," said owner Trish Boettcher. "People are just randomly calling who are not our regular clients."

Quarantines reached into the offices of two U.S. governors: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker joined his entire staff in working from home after a top aide tested positive for COVID-19, and Iowa’s Gov. Kim Reynolds began a partial quarantine.

In South Korea, the government clamped down again, halting school reopenings planned for this week and reimposing restrictions on nightclubs and bars. It is trying to track down 5,500 patrons of a Seoul nightlife district through credit-card transactions, cellphone records and security footage.

Roughly half of Spain’s 47 million people shifted into looser restrictions, beginning to socialize, shop in small stores and sit outdoors at restaurants. Its biggest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, remained under lockdown.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a modest easing of the country’s lockdown but urged citizens not to squander the progress made. Some people, however, were confused as the government shifted its slogan from "Stay at Home" to "Stay Alert." Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland stuck with the old motto.

India reported its biggest daily increase in cases Monday even as it prepared to resume train service.

In South Africa, authorities in Cape Town and the surrounding province considered reimposing restrictions because the area has become a hot spot accounting for about half the country’s 200 virus deaths.