Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

atlantisgate t1_j4waveh wrote

Reply to comment by Impressive-Spread663 in Sibley Memorial Hospital has a person dedicated to writing down the the name and tel# of visitors for the purposes of contact tracing for Covid. by [deleted]

???

Of course they can know whether the person was potentially in contact with you. If a person tests positie, and you checked in within 20 minutes of each other, wouldn't it be helpful to know you were sitting in the waiting room together? I know I'd be sure to stay at home if I got that information, and I wouldn't be tempted to skip the mask when I check my mail, for example. The doctors or nurses can also test positive, so it would be EXTRA great to know the person who examined your ear infection or broken leg and was in close proximity actually ended up being sick, wouldn't it?

People actually can test positive AT Sibley, which wouldn't require them to inform the hospital. They would already know

The fact that you come into contact with people who have COVID daily is probably an argument for more contact tracing, not abandoning it altogether. It makes extra sense in a care facility that receives serious covid cases and immunocompromised people daily.

Contact tracing clearly makes sense to the hospital, who presumably understand more about infectious disease than you do.

Contact tracing, of course, isn't foolproof, but it seems exceedingly silly that you're dismissing it as a tool based on vibes and assumptions when it was medical professionals who set it up in the first place.

3

ahmc84 t1_j4wcqm8 wrote

> The doctors or nurses can also test positive, so it would be EXTRA great to know the person who examined your ear infection or broken leg and was in close proximity actually ended up being sick, wouldn't it?

This right here is probably the biggest reason. The doctors and nurses are around people who might (or outright do, and are specifically at the hospital because they) have Covid, so they are at rather increased risk of infection, and subsequently passing it on to other patients. So it's good to keep contact information for patients so that if a staff member tests positive, they'll be able to inform all the patients that person saw.

And it's probably also a little bit about liability. People aren't supposed to be getting sick because they went to the hospital, so it's a good idea to be proactive about keeping track of how often that's happening. To know that, they have to be able to contact potentially exposed patients who went home to see if they test positive. If it's happening too much, they can adjust their procedures to fix it.

3