L.A. County has cut back on COVID-19 contact tracing as supercontagious BA.5 surges

L.A. County has cut back on COVID-19 contact tracing as supercontagious BA.5 surges

In March 2020, the thinking was “this is a brand-new pandemic and we can hopefully stop it in its tracks, or blunt the impact and buy people time from spreading it further until we get a vaccine,” said Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine. Now, “I just don’t see that we’re going to contact trace our way out of this,” Noymer said, especially as people have kept mingling but stopped wearing masks.