National Academy of Medicine panel says a vaccine won’t make current procedures go away

The National Academy of Medicine and American Public Health Association recently hosted a Covid-19 Conversation webinar in which panelists put forward the opinion that disease surveillance, testing, and contact tracing are some of the best public health tools available for managing the pandemic.

Moderator Karen DeSalvo, chief health officer at Google, said that even after a vaccine is deployed, surveillance, testing and contact tracing will remain crucial, according to a post on the National Academies website.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, echoed her sentiments. 

Don’t assume that when a vaccine gets here, it’ll be back to normal,” Osterholm was quoted as saying in the post. “I don’t see us leaving COVID-19 behind. I see us managing life differently.”

Osterholm said that surveillance enabled Minnesota to decide that bars and restaurants were a major source of outbreaks.

“If people won’t participate in contact tracing or refuse to get tested, that presents bigger challenges,” he was quoted as saying in the post. “I think we’re shifting from a problem of not enough tests, to not enough people who are willing to take them.”

LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department of Health, said that they are now seeking people out at their homes when they do not respond to attempts to contact them by phone as part of contact-tracing efforts.

“Home visits are a tried-and-true approach from our programs in other areas, like maternal health,” Nesbitt was quoted as saying in the release. “Some people have complex needs that can be better met by in-person engagement.”

At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with 50,000 students, professor Martin Burke said that quick turnarounds in testing became key to successfully handling any potential outbreaks.

“For our large university community, our biggest lesson is that fast, frequent testing is key,” Burke was quoted as saying in the post. “Test results come back in hours, rather than days, and we launched an app to deliver those results in a secure, HIPAA-compliant way.”