An April 22 MarketWatch article quotes Susan Michaels-Strasser, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, ICAP’s senior director of human resources for health (HRH) development, on the power of testing and contact tracing for epidemic control in the face of COVID-19.

Had [contact tracing] been started at the beginning of the outbreak, “we may have been able to get ahead of the transmission of this virus and stop it,” said Dr. Susan Michaels-Strasser, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

 

“When widespread community transmission started to occur and new cases started popping up in many locations at once, testing and tracing became unwieldy,” Michaels-Strasser said. “As the curve flattens and goes down and the number of new cases decreases, we need to go back to this action. It is the gold standard in containment of an epidemic.”

Read the full artlcle on MarketWatch

Read the latest ICAP updates on COVID-19 here