Coronavirus Today: What’s wrong with the CDC?

After the outbreak became too big to control, contact tracers were still able to slow things down and “buy people time” until COVID-19 vaccines became available, said Andrew Noymer, an [associate professor], epidemiologist and demographer at UC Irvine who studies infectious diseases. But at this stage of the pandemic, when so many people are taking so few precautions to avoid the coronavirus, “I just don’t see that we’re going to contact trace our way out of this,” he said.