Groceries And Rent Money: Why Support For COVID Isolation Is More Important Than Ever

While everyone's hopes are trained on COVID-19 vaccines to lead the way out of the pandemic, public health experts say that other public health tools are still crucial for stopping the virus.

One of those tools — contact tracing — may finally be ready to have its moment, says Crystal Watson, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. During the winter surge, contact tracers were overwhelmed; they couldn't possibly reach everyone who tested positive — and their close contacts — to tell them to stay home to slow the spread.

That's starting to change, Watson says. Case numbers are entering the zone where contact tracers can get on top of transmission. Vaccinations are ramping up and injecting hope into the public health response.

And there's finally billions of dollars — in the — to boost these efforts, so that if continue to spread through the summer and