Johns Hopkins launches online course to train army of contact tracers to slow spread of COVID-19
The free course, developed with Bloomberg Philanthropies, is available via Coursera to anyone in the world beginning May 11

A new Coursera class developed by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is now available to train contact tracers on the principles of the public health strategy many consider critical for slowing the spread of COVID-19.

The free six-hour course is open to anyone, but taking and passing it will be a requirement for thousands of contact tracers being hired by the state of New York to fight the pandemic. Within hours of its release Monday, more than 400 people had already registered for the class, according to Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Bloomberg School.
A long-used public health tool, contact tracing aims to break the chain of transmission of infectious diseases. The new Coursera class, "COVID-19 Contact Tracing," teaches the basics of interviewing people diagnosed with the virus, identifying their close contacts who might have been exposed, and providing them guidance for self-quarantine for two weeks.

"Even if you stop one or two new infections, you're preventing many new cases down the line," Johns Hopkins infectious disease epidemiologist Emily Gurley, the lead instructor of the course, said during a press briefing today. Gurley, who has a background in outbreak response, developed the curriculum with colleagues from the Bloomberg School, including Tolbert Nyenswah, who served as incident commander in response to the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.
The course is part of ambitious push for contact tracing backed by New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and former three-term mayor of New York City, who recently announced plans to develop a large-scale statewide program in New York. The program will include a baseline of 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 residents in the state and is expected to have 6,400 to 17,000 tracers statewide depending on the projected number of cases.

"Contact tracing allows us to communicate with people infected with COVID-19, identify those who may have been exposed, and provide all of them with guidance to limit the spread of the disease," Bloomberg said in a release. "This new training course, which we're making available online for free, will teach contact tracers how to do this work effectively—and help cities and states across the nation undertake these critical efforts."

Across the nation, an estimated workforce of 100,000 could be required to help limit the spread of COVID-19 and safely reopen the economy, according to a recent report by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

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