BALTIMORE — If you’re interested in helping combat the COVID-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins University is offering a free course to become a certified contact tracer.
The Course
The course can be done from the comfort of your home and is 100% online. It’s taught by Emily Gurley, Ph.D., an associate scientist in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“The COVID-19 crisis has created an unprecedented need for contact tracing across the country, requiring thousands of people to learn key skills quickly. The job qualifications for contact tracing positions differ throughout the country and the world, with some new positions open to individuals with a high school diploma or equivalent,” the university said.
CLICK HERE to enroll. The course is offered through Coursera and was created by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health.
The beginner level course teaches students about the science behind the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such as how dangerous it is, how it spreads and how contact tracing can be an effective tool in prevention.
According to the university, students will:
- Learn about how contact tracing is done
- How to build rapport with cases, identify their contacts and support both cases and their contacts to stop transmission in their communities.
- Learn about several important ethical considerations around contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine.
- Learn to identify some of the most common barriers to contact tracing efforts -- along with strategies to overcome them.
As of Wednesday, more than 680,000 people have signed up for the course.
The course takes around seven hours to complete and a certificate from the university will be issued upon completion.
Anyone wishing to take part in the course can do so by clicking, here.
CLICK HERE for more information on digital contact tracing from Johns Hopkins University.
How Contact Tracing Works
Here's a breakdown of what it involves:
Everything starts with a positive lab result. Once that's in, tracers talk to patients about their preexisting medical conditions, how to keep the virus from spreading outside their homes and where patients were in the two weeks prior to becoming ill.
RELATED: Ohio Department of Health is hiring contact tracers to track down the spread of COVID-19
The questions try to pinpoint when, where and who patients have interacted with over the 14-day period prior to the diagnosis. Tracers focus on people who the patients have talked to or been in close proximity to for at least 10 to 15 minutes.
Is Contact Tracing a New Concept?
While the demand for contact tracers is high right now due to the pandemic, contact tracing itself is nothing new. It's been used for years to track the spread of other disease outbreaks such as E. coli, salmonella or SARS.
RELATED: Contact tracers needed; here's how COVID-19 tracing works
Earlier this year, the Cleveland Department of Public Health and Case Western Reserve University teamed up to conduct contact tracing at a local level across Northeast Ohio. They've been working to identify cases both on campus and across the city with the goal of reducing the risk of transmission.
RELATED: Cleveland, Case Western teaming up to conduct contact tracing
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The CDC and the Ohio Department of Health are now recommending the use of cloth face coverings in public to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Read more about the CDC's recommendation here. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to make a face maskfrom common household materials, without having to know how to sew.
View a global coronavirus tracker with data from Johns Hopkins University.
