STATEWIDE--With coronavirus cases spiking in Indiana and all across the country, contact tracers have had to make changes.
The Indiana Department of Health is no longer going to alert people who may have come into contact with someone who’s tested positive for the coronavirus.
“We recognize we had to make some changes to our process because with more cases, interviews were taking much longer and we’re seeing cases lost to follow up,” said Indiana State Health Commissioner Kris Box.
The department will only alert people who test positive for the virus and leave it up to them to tell anyone who they believe has been a close contact.
“To help ease this bottleneck, we’ve shortened our script for interviews of positive cases. The contact tracers will strongly encourage the positive individual to notify all of their close contacts. A close contact is a person who has been within six feet of you for 15 minutes or more throughout the course of a day,” said Box.
Box said they will still gather as much information from the person that they’re willing to share, but they had to take some steps out of the process to save time.
Box and Holcomb will give another coronavirus news briefing next Wednesday at 2:30 pm. They are expected to give more specifics about the distribution of a coronavirus vaccine throughout Indiana.
