Kaiser Permanente donates $63 million to expand tracing of coronavirus cases in California
Kaiser Permanente will pour $63 million into building teams of hundreds of home-grown contact tracers to slow the spread of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 10,000 Californians and pummeled communities of color here and across the U.S.
“We must reduce the spread of COVID-19 and care for the communities that are being hardest hit by the virus,” Kaiser Permanente chairman and CEO Greg A. Adams said in a statement Monday announcing the new initiative.
Kaiser is giving the money as a grant to the Oakland-based Public Health Institute to create teams based in communities hard-hit by COVID-19 that will be embedded in Kaiser clinical settings and supporting local public health departments — the better to flood COVID hot spots and reduce the numbers sickened by the deadly virus.
“The intent is that, for every team that is assigned to a Kaiser clinic, we will have another team ... to work closely with the county,” said Marta Induni, a Sacramento resident who runs the institute’s contact tracing program.
How the teams are comprised
Teams are made up of eight contact tracers, a supervisor and a resource coordinator who works the closest with those sickened or exposed to the virus to get them the resources they need to quarantine or isolate, Induni said.
“We calculate that a team (of four) can reach about 100 people a day at different stages of case investigation or contact tracing,” Induni added. “We don’t want to say we’re going to reach everyone right away and that this will be under control, but I think we’ll approach it in a manner that has made us successful in other places.”
The multimillion-dollar effort will fund as many as 500 people working in hospitals, clinics and other medical facilities to track and rapidly respond to the virus, Adams said.
Induni noted that funding also will link those who need to isolate themselves to services that can cover the cost of food, housing, child care and other needs.
“A lot of people, if they don’t go to work, they don’t get paid. They say, ‘I don’t want to quarantine because I’m not going to be able to pay my rent.’”
But rent assistance may be available, she said. The resource coordinator works with the county and other organizations to find whatever aid is needed.
Similar program got started quickly in Pacific Northwest
Public Health Institute previously worked with community groups in the greater Portland area: Clark County, Washington, and neighboring Washington County, Oregon.
Induni quickly recruited and trained a multilingual tracing team that helped Clark County clear people to return to their work - something that would not have happened as easily without bilingual tracers on the job, she said.
“We were able to recruit some (institute) employees to learn contract tracing really quickly,” Induni said. “Within a day, we were on board making phone calls about people’s symptoms and making sure they were eligible to go back to work.”
Washington County was the institute’s first contract. The Bay Area organization had already forged ties with community-based groups in the county that later helped them recruit the tracing teams — and, as important, build community trust.
“One thing that’s paramount is having a culturally sensitive and representative workforce that is also multilingual,” Induni said. “We worked really closely with community-based organizations to (hire) people who would be representative of the community and that the community would trust to reach out to people.”
Induni did not know whether Sacramento County, home to Kaiser Permanente hospitals, will be one of the institute’s sites — counties have not yet been chosen — but she said Sacramento “has a good population to make it successful here.”
Coalition of nonprofit funders
In addition to the Kaiser funding, 10 philanthropies have kicked in nearly $19 million, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced, saying the escalating health crisis required an “all hands on deck” response from government, nonprofits and other sectors. “It’s on all of us to step up and pitch in, especially in communities disproportionately impacted by the virus.”
The coalition represents major names in the world of California charitable giving, including the California Wellness Foundation, Blue Shield of California Foundation and the California Endowment, which funds health care reporting for The Sacramento Bee.
The twin initiatives were announced less than a day after the state’s public health director Dr. Sonia Angell resigned her post just five months into the pandemic and as the state passed the grim 10,000-death milestone.
The Newsom administration also acknowledged last week that the state has been significantly undercounting the number of coronavirus cases because labs had issues sending results to a state database.
“Our data system failed, and that failure led to inaccurate case numbers and positivity rates, We apologize,” Dr. Mark Ghaly, the chief of California’s health agency, said Friday. “You deserve better. The governor demands better.”
Over the weekend, the state worked through a backlog caused by the data glitches of nearly 300,000 COVID-19 test results.
California has more than 554,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Monday, according to the COVID Tracking Project and Johns Hopkins University.
“The recent increase of cases in California demonstrates the importance of being able to accurately track the virus and respond where and when it begins to surge in order to save lives,” Adams said.
This story was originally published August 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Kaiser Permanente donates $63 million to expand tracing of coronavirus cases in California."
