Tarrant County denies proposal to hire temporary workers to help with COVID-19 cases
Tarrant County commissioners denied the health director’s request on Tuesday to add up to 270 temporary epidemiologists and nurses to assist in COVID-19 contact tracing and investigations amid surging case counts in the county.
County Health Director Vinny Taneja asked the court for contract workers to help with case investigation and contact tracing. He would have hired epidemiologists and nurses. The request included 105 contact tracers, 151 nurses/epidemiologist specialists, 12 administrative workers and two informatics workers, WFAA reported. The program would also require furniture, IT and space. The total program cost was $20,458,910. The federal assistance from the CARES Act would have been used toward the cost.
County Judge Glen Whitley and commissioners Gary Fickes and J.D. Johnson voted against Taneja’s proposal. Roy Brooks and Devan Allen voted for it.
“We needed the staffing, as you can see, the cases are growing,” Taneja said in an interview after the vote. “It just puts us in a little bit of a setback of more time needed to re-evaluate how to strategize and move forward. So we’ll work on that.”
The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has more than tripled in Tarrant County since June 1. Positive cases have nearly tripled and the test positivity rate, which was supposed to fall as more people got tested, has quadrupled over the last few weeks, from 5% to almost 20%
Whitley said there was not enough information on where more than 200 people would work, if they had enough equipment for them or who would manage them.
“I need more details before I’m willing to commit that kind of money, even if it’s CARES Act money,” he said.
The county hired about 60 temporary employees to contact trace in May. Taneja said after the meeting that the commissioners want to see the results of those hires. Usually, these workers get a case, call the person who’s infected, ask them who’ve they’ve been in contact with and build a list of people they need to call.
The county is seeing 3,000 to 4,000 new cases per week, including 531 on Tuesday, bringing the total number to 19,014 since the pandemic began.
Tarrant County COVID testing
Whitley the county is focusing on expanded testing and getting results back as quickly as possible. It has been speaking with vendors in California and New Jersey, with the goal having at least one COVID-19 testing location in each precinct and a couple of mobile sites that would visit hot spots.
These vendors would replace and expand the testing that was being conducted by the National Guard, which left Tarrant County on Sunday, Whitley said.
More testing and faster results leads to a better response from the health department, Taneja said. Right now, it takes about six days after a sample is collected for the department to get the result.
“If you ask me, that’s way too long, because then it puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that that contact tracing is done,” he said.
The faster test results come in the better, he said. Tests that take multiple days to come are meaningless because that person doesn’t know if they’re positive and they could be coming into contact with others.
Ultimately, the best way to speed up results is for the demands for COVID-19 tests to go down, Taneja said.
“As long as the volume of testing keeps going up, these labs, they’re struggling to maintain a good turnaround time,” he said.
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 6:04 PM.
