LevelUP HCS, a New York-based talent solution and HR advisory company, will support the recruitment of contact tracers, community support specialists, and team supervisors that will make up New York State’s contact tracing pilot program. The nation-leading program was announced by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and Mike Bloomberg on April 22. These contact tracing teams will be a critical part of the effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. LevelUP has launched a comprehensive effort to identify and vet qualified candidates who will be trained and deployed in accordance with the NY state program supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies.
New York’s contact tracing program is expected to have 6,400 to 17,000 tracers statewide, depending on projected number of cases, and will operate through the next flu season. Contact tracing teams will work remotely with state-of-the-art software to develop New York state’s secure database of information on the spread of the infection.
As part of this effort, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health -- the top-rated public health school in the country – in consultation with DOH, is developing a world-class online curriculum for the State’s contact tracers that includes a training program and an online exam that must be passed to complete the program. Vital Strategies’ initiative Resolve to Save Lives will provide technical and operational advising to New York State Health Department staff.
Interested NY State residents are encouraged to apply with the State for the following positions: Contact Tracer, Community Support Specialist, and Team Supervisors.
Contact tracing will help prevent the spread of COVID-19 with four key steps. First, labs will report positive cases of COVID-19 immediately to contact tracers on a daily basis. The contact tracer will then interview the positive patient to identify people they may have been in contact with over the past 14 days. The contact tracer will notify and interview each contact to alert them to their risk of infection and instruct those contacts to quarantine or isolate for 14 days to be sure they don’t spread COVID-19 to others. The contact tracers will monitor those contacts by text throughout the duration of their quarantine or isolation to see if the contacts are showing any symptoms.
