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Why many countries failed at COVID contact-tracing — but some got it right

Rich nations have struggled with one of the most basic and important methods for controlling infectious diseases.
  1. Dyani Lewis

    1. Dyani Lewis is a freelance science journalist in Melbourne, Australia.

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Healthcare workers wearing protective personal equipment examine a resident at his door

Health-care workers conduct contact-tracing amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Soyapango, El Salvador, in July. Credit: Jose Cabezas/Reuters

When Ebola ripped through communities in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, Tolbert Nyenswah saw at first hand how health workers extinguished the epidemic by finding and quarantining contacts of those who caught the disease. The former director of Liberia’s public-health institute thought contact-tracers would again rise to the challenge this year, keeping COVID-19 in check as it swept the globe. “Contact-tracing is one of the greatest tools that countries should deploy and use effectively to contain the outbreak,” he says.

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Nature 588, 384-387 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03518-4

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 17 December 2020: An earlier version of this feature referred to the wrong guidance from the WHO on quarantining contacts in designated facilities. It should have referred to guidance issued in February, not August. The text and reference 4 have been updated accordingly. Furthermore, it erred in stating that the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

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