Maymie Owens will graduate in December with a bachelor of science in public health. She’s working 28 to 30 hours each week providing information to close contacts of COVID-19 positive status students, faculty and staff.

“It gives me the chance to be part of something that can improve the health of the community, as well as gain background knowledge for my future career,” Owens said. 

It’s a big job that can help stop the spread of COVID-19, says Craig Blakely, dean of the School of Public Health and Information Sciences.

“In the absence of a vaccine, contact tracing is paramount. If we can stop the spread of the virus at points of contact, then everyone else is more free to move about while practicing physical distancing and wearing masks.  

“Our students are gaining incredible experience for their future public health careers. This work is a resume builder for the students, some of whom earn practicum or capstone experience credit. More importantly, it is crucial to helping our community fight COVID-19,” he said.

It is Owens’ second time working as a contact tracer. She was one of 40 UofL public health, biomedical science and medical students, along with medical residents who volunteered the past few months with the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health & Wellness’ (LMPHW) contact tracing team.

“We would make sure residents of Jefferson County who tested positive were staying isolated and quarantined, while ensuring they had someone who could bring them groceries and toiletry items. If not, we would connect them with resources to try and help meet their needs,” she said.

Lydia Tanque is working to complete a bachelor of arts in public health and says she welcomed the chance to work with environmental health professionals on a health issue affecting the lives of so many.  

“One of the most valuable things that I’ve learned is being able to observe how different systems work together. Some days we’ll receive an influx of new cases from our testing facilities on campus. Other days we receive no new cases for hours. We must maintain daily contact with Campus Health Services and provide daily data reports,” Tanque said.

Student workers central to UofL’s fight against COVID-19

The student workers have greatly expanded the bandwidth of Campus Health Services, says Cheri Hildreth, director of the Department of Environmental Health and Safety.

Campus Health makes initial calls to members of the UofL community who test positive for COVID-19, and then Hildreth’s team makes phone calls to positive cases and close contacts, providing education and information on up-to-date isolation safety measures and guidelines.

It is a robust operation performed by a full-time DEHS employee and 11 public health student workers. Utilizing her knowledge as a contact tracer with LMPHW, environmental health doctoral candidate Sivarchana Mareedu has helped develop training courses, a contact tracer script, an eight-step workflow and shadowing opportunities for UofL’s contact tracing workforce.

“Sivarchana had the necessary insight to create a plan that has helped the program run smoothly from start to finish. She is our contact tracing team supervisor and a phenomenal asset,” Hildreth said. “All the students working with us are proactive, have great communication skills and are detail oriented – we couldn’t do it without them.”

For Owens, the experience has provided the hours needed for her capstone experience, a requirement of graduation.

“I’ve exceeded those hours but I am not stopping because the help is still needed,” she said.  

Like Owens, Tanque says she is grateful to be part of something meaningful.

“After feeling like life was essentially on pause these past few months, I’m glad to be back on campus with the rest of my classmates. It feels like I’m a part of the fight for all of us to one day get past this,” she said.

The study, , also projects the city may be able to gradually reopen by early June if even stronger containment measures – especially more extensive testing and consistent contact tracing and quarantine of all newly infected individuals – are implemented.

But the study also warns that if strong and effective social distancing measures are pulled back too quickly, as many as 900 more people in Louisville would die and about 2,000 more would be hospitalized by August.

Seyed Karimi, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Management and System Sciences at the UofL School of Public Health and Information Sciences, co-authored the report.

“We know from our modeling that decreasing the current social distancing measures without increased efforts to test, isolate, and do contact tracing can move us to an unstable path with increased hospitalization and infection trends that could be catastrophic,” said Karimi, who also is a health economist with LMPHW.

Study co-author Sarah Moyer, MD, director of LMPHW and the city’s chief health strategist, said the study projects that measures the city put in place in March averted a surge of COVID-19 patients that otherwise would have overwhelmed Louisville’s health care system. Going forward, only about 400 of Louisville’s 3,600 hospital beds will be needed for COVID-19 patients if current social distancing measures remain in place.

“This model validates the measures we have put in place to control the spread of COVID-19 in Louisville thus far,” Moyer said. “The study also serves as affirmation of our state and local efforts to slowly release restrictions.”

“The study is a good example of how academic research can inform real-life public health policy decisions to protect community health,” said Craig Blakely, PhD, MPH, dean of the University of Louisville School of Public Health and Information Sciences.

Mayor Greg Fischer expressed his appreciation for the collaborative effort between UofL and the local health department, adding that the data underscores what city and health officials have been saying: “While we’re making progress in the fight against COVID-19, we still have a long way to go.

“Even as some restrictions are eased, we must stay focused and vigilant,” he said. “That’s why I have extended the executive order continuing the state of emergency here until June 1. It’s important that we not get our guard down against this dastardly disease.”

Researchers used the Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model, which measures the effect of public health policy interventions to contain an infection. They projected trends in the numbers of actively circulating COVID-19 infections, active hospitalizations, and deaths in the city from April 20 to August 20.

The authors considered two potential scenarios that estimated the current number of COVID-19 deaths in Louisville. The scenarios consider two different dates for the effectiveness of public and private social distancing policies in Jefferson County – March 31 and April 7, which they labeled as status quo scenarios.

Under each of the two scenarios, researchers considered four potential alternatives reflecting outcomes if social distancing and other containment strategies had been either weaker or stronger by 10% increments. They projected number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths that Louisville would see under each of those social distancing scenarios.

Their projections show that if stronger containment methods had been used from the presumed intervention days of March 31 and April 7, transmission of the virus would have decreased significantly, such that the number of infections in June would have been in two digits. On the other hand, if weaker containment methods were used from the presumed intervention days, virus transmission would have increased remarkably, such that the number of infections and hospitalization would not soon have stabilized.

Other report authors include Natalie DuPre, ScD, MS, Bert Little, PhD, MA, W. Paul McKinney, MD, all of the SPHIS.

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