Berkman Klein Center For Internet And Society: Audio Fishbowl

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change, the National Governors Association, and Partners In Health’s U.S. Public Health Accompaniment Unit hold a session exploring how US state and local public health leaders can implement retrospective contact tracing to identify Covid-19 clusters and mitigate their spread. Currently, almost every US state relies on prospective contact tracing: when an infected person is identified, contact tracers try to identify and notify the infected person’s contacts since being infected. However, there’s an additional, effective method that states can add to their toolkit: retrospective tracing. Once tracers identify an infected person, they can look backwards to find when and where the person was infected and identify who else might have been infected simultaneously as part of a ‘cluster’. Experts are increasingly aware of the outsized effects of superspreader incidents in the