Florida State Rep. Shevrin Jones (D) criticized the state’s contact tracing initiative on Tuesday, calling his own recent experience with a call from a tracer “a joke.”
Rep. Shevrin Jones (D-FL) called contact tracing "a joke" in a CNN interview on Tuesday when asked about his own experience with contact tracing in Florida after testing positive for the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/PaBSxLpdw3
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) July 7, 2020
Jones told CNN’s John Berman that he received a call from a contract tracer last Thursday who appeared to be reading from a questionnaire.
“There was no question that she was asking that would have led her to the point of who I had probably come in contact with,” Jones said.
The Florida lawmaker had already slammed the tracing system in tweets on Monday, saying it was “understaffed” and calling for an overhaul.
Unfortunately, the @HealthyFla rep called me and attempted to do contact tracing for my Covid-19, but she: 1) Was unprofessional, 2) Her phone disconnected and I have not heard from them since last Thursday.
If this is our tracking system, throw all of it in the ?
— Shevrin Jones (@ShevrinJones) July 6, 2020
The state lawmaker said that he was not able to identify where he had been exposed to the coronavirus but regretted that he had “gotten lax and started back shaking hands.”
The Florida Department of Health has roughly 1,600 students, epidemiologists and other staff conducting tracing, with plans to bring on 600 more for a total of 2,200. That is only about a third of the roughly 6,400 tracers needed to meet the recommended 30 tracers per 100,000 people standard set by the National Association of County and City Health Officials, The New York Times reported.
Those tracers are especially important as Florida breaks daily infection records. Just on Saturday the Department of Health reported a record more than 11,400 new infections. The number of infections threatens to overwhelm the existing system for tracing contacts.
Thanks for this article.
Its being covered by all the major media in the state right now, because it is a joke.
Personally, I think its pretty clear that DeSantis just wants to throw up his arms about the entire crisis ala Trump (and he has tried on multiple occasions to do just that), and just pretend it isn’t happening.
But with Dems fielding candidates for every seat in the State Legislature, his own people realize that that approach is political folly that may very well cost them the Legislature for the first time in over 2 decades.
Its also probably dooming his re-election plans for 2022 too.
Thanks for the up close view, very informative
All I can figure at this time is GOP must think their constituents are stupid. I guess time will tell…
They are figuring that their constituents hate Dems more than they hate any of their screw ups.
Interesting. My retired law partner got a job as one of the first contact tracers in Massachusetts. He’s worked himself out of a job–there are so few new cases being discovered here that most of the tracers have voluntarily taken unemployment or been let go. (I just hope none of them have to be called back.)
My only problem with contact tracing in GA was that it took them 2 weeks before they even called me. Most people wouldn’t remember where they had been 2 weeks ago if they are relatively active.