LA County has cut back on COVID-19 contact tracing as supercontagious BA.5 surges
LOS ANGELES — After Julianne Cline went out and got tested for COVID-19 this June, text messages and voicemails soon piled up from Los Angeles County contact tracers who wanted to talk to her.
Cline, 32, ignored them. She had been sick for days, and by the time she roused herself from bed to get officially tested, it seemed like "by the time they would have done any contact tracing, it would have been so long that those folks would have likely already gotten sick," the Manhattan Beach resident said.
Besides, she said, "I just didn't feel comfortable sharing my personal experience with the county."
As the pandemic has dragged on, L.A. County contact tracers have struggled to reach and interview people with COVID. In January, amid a crush of cases driven by the omicron variant, there were weeks when contact tracers were reaching and interviewing less than 10% of their assigned cases, county data show.
This summer, that number has stagnated below 30% in recent weeks — better than during the winter surge,
