Franklin Matters: Boston Globe: Contact tracing background; high school 'lost year'?

Monday, April 27, 2020

Boston Globe: Contact tracing background; high school 'lost year'?

From the Boston Globe, articles of interest to Franklin:

Contact tracing background

"Dr. Emily Wroe started working for Boston-based Partners in Health, the renowned global health nonprofit, while still a Harvard medical student. She worked with the government of Rwanda to build a modern hospital in the country’s poor northern region, perched on a terraced hilltop surrounded by subsistence farms. Later, in Malawi, she treated patients with tuberculosis and HIV, working with community health workers to track down sick patients by foot and, sometimes, motorbike.

Now she’s building a new squad of public health workers. Only this one is based in Massachusetts and it’s a virtual one, 1,000-people strong. Their mission is to track down every person in the state who comes in close contact with an infected person and help them isolate, thereby slowing the spread of the deadly virus.

And this time, the tracking will be done by telephone.

Wroe is part of the Partners in Health team charged with creating the state’s ambitious contact tracing program, which Governor Charlie Baker announced earlier this month. The administration, which has allotted $44 million to the program, sees contact tracing as a key piece of its plan to eventually open the economy up and allow people to venture out again, without fear of infection."

Continue reading the article online (subscription may be required)
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/25/metro/way-out-inside-ambitious-mass-coronavirus-contact-tracing-effort/

Hard, maybe cruel even, but better a 'lost year' than losing 'a life'

"Catari Giglio did everything she could to make the senior prom at Fenway High School picture perfect. She had the elegant gown, the handsome date; she had even designed the tickets for the big event.

Vivian Santos-Smith had a lead role in Somerville High School’s production of “As You Like It.” As winter turned to spring, and set and costumes came together, she spent hours memorizing her famous speech, the one that begins “All the world’s a stage …”

Mairead Baker, valedictorian at Boston Latin Academy, was writing the graduation speech that she would deliver to hundreds of beaming teachers and families, reflecting on the hard lessons of her past.

Like 80,000 other high school seniors across Massachusetts who learned this week that their schools will remain closed through June, they know their personal disappointments are a small price to pay to help end a global pandemic. But for young people whose lives have been defined by school since the age of 5 — who were on a path to high school graduation before they knew the word “commencement” — it was a stunning reversal of fortune, their most assured milestones disappearing in an instant."