Miami-Dade says it won’t rely on Florida for contact tracing, launching larger effort

Miami-Dade won’t rely on Florida’s program to trace close contacts of people infected with COVID-19 and plans to deploy hundreds of people to dramatically ramp up the effort in the county, according to Mayor Carlos Gimenez and others in his administration.

Gimenez described a plan to deploy as many as 1,000 contact tracers, dwarfing the effort already under way in the county by the state Department of Health. The state has about 200 contact tracers working in Miami-Dade, a county with more than 16,000 people who have tested positive for COVID-19.

“Right now the state has a total of 1,000 contract tracers statewide. We’re going to have 800 to 1,000 right here in Miami-Dade,” Gimenez told county commissioners this week. “We’re going to put that together. We’re trying to work with the state on this, but we may have to do some of this on our own. I believe the state understands that.”

Contact tracers are foot soldiers in battles against any virus, assigned the job of interviewing people who get sick and trying to get their close contacts tested as well. The idea is to prevent the kind of exponential spread that occurs when those contacts infect others before realizing they’ve caught the virus.

Health advocates have been calling for the United States to dramatically increase spending on contact tracing as the best way to reduce the rate of COVID-19 infection. In Miami-Dade, Gimenez has been under pressure to find a way to boost Florida’s contact-tracing efforts in a county with about a third of the state’s COVID-19 cases.

On March 23, one of his top critics on the County Commission, Daniella Levine Cava, wrote him that “there is not sufficient contact tracing from those who have tested positive” for COVID-19.

The Miami office of Florida’s Health Department has the task of contact tracing for communicable diseases, and will routinely tap investigators to try to slow spreads of tuberculosis, measles and dengue fever. County government does not have a health arm, so Miami-Dade’s role in contact tracing during COVID-19 is unprecedented.

Florida’s Department of Health was not available for comment Wednesday on Miami-Dade potentially launching its own contact-tracing effort. The agency said on May 5 it had 175 contact tracers assigned to Miami-Dade.

The Gimenez administration has not said when it plans to deploy its first contact tracer, who would do the work, or how much it would cost.

Jacques Bentolila, the county administrator tapped by Gimenez to launch the contact-tracing initiative, said Miami-Dade may convert county employees to contact tracers. The rest of the slots would be filled by outside hires or contractors. The overall strategy would be to assist Florida in its existing contract-tracing efforts, he said.

“Nobody is looking to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

Bentolila said a main focus of the project will be nursing homes, where outbreaks have caused increases in COVID-19 hospitalizations in recent days.

“We are going to focus on vulnerable populations in the community,” said Bentolila, deputy director of the county’s Internal Services Department. “Our long-term-care facilities is a major area that the mayor is very concerned about.”

Miami Herald staff writer Ben Conarck contributed to this report.