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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll start today with a big political coronavirus story in New York City, which is the resignation of the city's Health Commissioner in the middle of a pandemic. According to her resignation letter, Dr. Oxiris Barbot decided to leave largely because Mayor de Blasio snubbed the Health Department in launching the city's contact tracing program. He gave it to the public hospital system, the Health and Hospitals Corporation, instead.

Now, this decision matters a lot, not because of palace intrigue, turf, who cares about their jobs, and who gets to run what but because of how important contact tracing is to containing the spread of the virus. When people test positive for coronavirus, the government now tries to trace who that person had close contact with and asks those people to quarantine. New York City's contact tracing program began on June 1.

Among the ways that matters is that if the city's economy is ever going to recover, and people are going to get their jobs and their rent money back, people exposed to the virus need to be traced and isolated right away so a case at a workplace doesn't become an outbreak at a workplace, forcing everyone to get laid off again, how well this is done matters a lot.

Dr. Barbot wrote this in her resignation letter and released it to the media, "I leave my post today with deep disappointment that during the most critical public health crisis in our lifetime, that the Health Department's incomparable disease control expertise was not used to the degree it could have been. Our experts are world-renowned for their epidemiology, surveillance, and response work. The city would be well served by having them at the strategic center of the response, not in the background."

Okay, the mayor and the health commissioner had a disagreement over turf, happens all the time in politics. What we will ask now, though, is how that matters to keeping you safe from coronavirus. Specifically, how is Mayor de Blasio's decision to do contact tracing without the health department at the center of it working out? With me for this is New York Times Metro correspondent, Sharon Otterman. As it happened, she wrote an article last week before Dr. Barbot resigned, called City Praises Contact-Tracing Program. Workers Call Rollout a 'Disaster.'. Hi, Sharon. Thanks for your reporting and thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Sharon Otterman: Thanks so much, Brian, it's an honor to be here.

Brian: How did you go about evaluating the city's contact tracing program? What were we looking for?

Sharon: Well, the most important thing was trying to get behind whatever you're saying on the podium about its success and trying to actually reach out to the contact tracers themselves to see what their experience is like and what kinds of communications they were getting. Quite a few contact tracers were brave and did speak with me. They shared pretty much every internal document that had been produced that they had seen, and I got to see the internal communications that they were having.

Brian: I have a teeny tiny little bit of experience with contact tracing that I'll share just for context. I once got contact traced. I was living with a roommate who came back from overseas with a case of E. coli that was bad enough that he went to the doctor. I was listed as an emergency contact, and apparently, E. coli is a must report disease to the health department for the doctors. Sure enough, someone from the Health Department called up to find out if my roommate had eaten at a New York City restaurant? The answer was no. He was already sick when he came back from overseas.

That's all the contact tracer wanted to know, if the person might have gotten it from the New York City restaurant because then they would have presumably gone to inspect that restaurant to look for other cases that the place could have been generating and try to stop any outbreak that might have been taking place. I thought, "Okay, good. The Health Department is on it, at least for E. coli." Now, that was a while ago, but is that a good example of how contact tracing works?

Sharon: Prior to the pandemic, the Department of Health in New York City, as Department of Health do across the nation, was in charge of contact tracing. It's a core competency of a public health department. Whenever there's a disease like the one that you were describing, or tuberculosis, HIV, they call and try to figure out who you may have infected or where you got infected. If you remember the beginning of the pandemic, when there was that first lawyer from New Rochelle, we were seeing contact tracing in New York city.

We remember he'd taken the Metro North, he'd gone to his office. He went back and trying to identify who he had been in contact with. Then very shortly after that, as the virus exploded and it turned out, we had probably thousands, if not tens of thousands of untested cases here. You just stopped hearing about contact tracing in New York City in conjunction with this virus.

Brian: You wrote your first article about problems with the contact tracing rollout back on June 21st when it was only three weeks old. At that time, you cited a stat that only a

third of the people testing positive for coronavirus that month gave contact tracers the information about who they had been in contact with. Has that success rate gotten better?

Sharon: You know, one of the big problems with this program right now is a lack of transparency about the effectiveness of it. There's all kinds of statistics about it, some of which they like to talk about and which might not be that helpful. For example, right before this article came out, the city said that they had reached 96% of the people who had been infected in the last two weeks, but reached in their definition could literally mean they called and the person spoke to them for a minute and then hung up.

We're trying to get more substantive information about how effective it is. That number, what percentage of people actually gave a contact to the tracer has improved, but not by much. I think it's around 42% now, as opposed to 35% in the first weeks of this new program.

Brian: For your new article, you quoted, for example, one of the 3,000 contact tracers, a public health grad student now working as a contact tracer, who said, "It reminds me of an Amazon warehouse or something where we are judged more on call volume or case volume than quality of conversations." Can you take us deeper into what that complaint suggests about what is taking place?

Sharon: Let me take you back a little bit into what this new contact tracing program is. Around the country, departments of health are trying to beef up their contact tracing by hiring a lot of new workers and maybe paying them $25 an hour. Sometimes they're volunteers and they work with the health department to reach out one by one to all the people who get positive test results. In New York Cty, in early May, the Mayor decided to move that from the Department of Health to Health and Hospitals, which is the big public hospital department that runs all the public hospitals in this city.

By doing so he ended up adding an extra layer of bureaucracy because now you have the people who know about contact tracing are in the Health Department, and now you have the public hospitals running the program. The Mayor's big argument for this was that it had more capacity as this huge public hospital system spread across the city, but it turned out and I didn't realize this until I started talking to the tracers, but they also did not have the capacity to run this program.

They ended up outsourcing the development of this call center to Optum, which is this billion-dollar subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. A lot of your colleagues might actually have dealt with Optum maybe with their pharmacy benefits or other call center health-related activities. Now, you have three bureaucracies, you have Optum doing the technical side of running a call center.

You have Health and Hospitals doing supervision, but they don't know anything about contact tracing. Then you have the Department of Health who's experts are sort of brought in to advise and provide direction, but because of all the extra people involved, it's not clear how effective of a setup that was going to be.

Brian: How does this come out on the ground? You report on the script of a questionnaire early on that the tracers go through with coronavirus positive people on the phone. Listeners, you'll find this one interesting. Sharon saw an interaction on a video and reports that it can take 45 minutes to get through demographic information like race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and only then question number 11 was who they may have exposed to the virus? Has that been an impediment, Sharon, to getting good information?

Sharon: Yes, for the first six weeks of this program, they had extremely detailed demographic and sexual orientation questions at the top of the interview. You would ask, are you Dominican? Are you Jewish? Are you Jamaican? Very detailed about sexual orientation. Are you questioning? Are you? In other words, there are lots of lists of choices. A lot of the people who are getting coronavirus right now are from immigrant populations where you might not talk about this stuff openly.

Some tracers were reporting that by the time they get to step 11, which is who you may have exposed people were already kind of done with the conversation. The other problem was because of the call center nature, the tracers have a queue in front of them that lists the different people they're supposed to call. If a person on the other end, the person who's sick had to go in the middle of the conversation, that person would then pop out of your queue and into someone else's queue.

Someone else to continue the conversation, it would be a completely different tracer. When you read about best practices for tracing, it's all about developing this trust with the person on the other end of the line, so that they give you this personal information, who did you see, who were you in contact with? Just structurally, it seemed like a difficult match between the structure of the program and actually what it was supposed to be doing.

Brian: Outsourced privatization works again. My guest is Sharon Otterman, New York Times Metro reporter who's covering the contact tracing program in New York City to help contain the coronavirus on the occasion of the resignation of the New York City Health Commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot because she and her department were cut out of running that program even though they have contact tracing experience.

Now, listeners help us report this story. Are any of the 3,000 New York City contact tracer listening right now and want to call in and tell your own story? Of course, you can do that anonymously if you want. You can also support the program, by the way, if you want. If you think this is working pretty well now and they're starting to get the act together and you're actually helping tamp down the spread of the virus, you can call and say that too or you can call and help Sharon Otterman from the times reveal a problem.

646-435-7280 is our phone number, or anyone out there and this should be a lot more than the 3,000 people who are working in the program who've been contact traced with respect to coronavirus. Have you been contacted because either you tested positive, or you were named by somebody who did test positive as somebody who should be quarantining and whose name the system should know?

If you've been contact traced or if you are a contact tracer, help us report this story. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Sharon, as you know so much about coronavirus has a disparate impact on lower-income people especially lower-income people of color. Can you tell, if anything, about the problems with the contact tracing program also have a disparate impact?

Sharon: I want to start out by saying just, there are some positive obviously impacts of this program. I do want to say just for the listeners who are concerned about their health, the call center's structure that they developed does now successfully reach people. Now it's a question of now that we can get them on the phone, what are we going to do? What are we going to ask them? What information are we going to get? The other positive function that the tracers are serving is that they are connecting people with resources? I think, Dr. Long,who runs the program talk to you about this on your show earlier, Brian.

Brian: That's right. Dr. Ted Long who was here.

Sharon: If you need medicine delivery, food delivery, they can help you a note from a doctor to get out of work, they can help you with that. Those are benefits to the program. I think historically when reaching out to minority communities, people who have been underserved by the medical establishment in general, you are going to have a greater sense of distrust. That might make it even harder to contact trace. They have not released any data about that, about whether people from different ethnic groups, for example, may be completing interviews at higher lower rates. In reality, we don't exactly know how that might be impacting compliance with this.

Brian: We should say that the city right now has a remarkably low coronavirus transmission rate, maybe the best in the country of any big city, as almost the whole rest of the country is going in the wrong direction. We even as you probably know, just put Rhode Island on the quarantine list of states that people are coming into New York from because there's an increasing rate of coronavirus cases there and so almost the whole rest of the country is now being required to quarantine when they come into New York because New York is doing so much better than the rest of the country. Is it possible to say how much of this success could be from an effective contact tracing program?

Sharon: It's funny because when the mayor was asked about the health commissioner's resignation, he said, "Oh, but everything's working, looking at our rates." That's not a rigorous analysis of the contact tracing program, obviously. I think we can say that we're doing well in testing. Of course, the delay in test results is a big problem but we do have the ability to do 50,000 tests a day, and I think that has really helped. I also think regular New Yorkers now are very aware that if they don't feel well, they should stay home. I think that's very clear.

As for the impact of a contact tracing program, the Mayor and Ted Long who represents the program, but he does not himself have any experience as an epidemiologist or anything. They like to say that thousands of infections have been prevented because they have reached contacts that were already symptomatic. Epidemiologists would say if the contacts are already symptomatic by the time you reach them, you probably reach them too late because we're trying to prevent infections.

There's no way to know whether those people would have isolated even if you had enough called them or not. There is somebody inside the program, who's the Director of Trace. His name is Dr. Neil Vora. He is actually a Department of Health person who was brought over from the Department of Health into this test and trace structure. He actually is very knowledgeable and as an epidemiologist.

In his internal communications with tracers, he's expressed concern because the vast majority of cases or at least the large majority of cases in New York City are just popping up randomly. In other words, they're not linked to other cases. The hallmark of an effective contact tracing program is that close to 100% of cases that show up in your city, you know where they came from. We're not even close to knowing where all of our cases come from. I think ultimately that's how you get the outbreak under control.

Brian: Julie Ann Chadom, you're on WNYC. Hi, Julie.

Julie: Hi, Brian, I listen to your show all the time. Fantastic, so helpful. I'm sorry, I tuned in late. I did hear your guest. I'm sorry, I didn't even hear the introduction where she was from.

Brian: I'm going to say because a lot of people are tuning in along the way here, that she is Sharon Otterman, metro reporter for The New York Times who's reporting on the success or failure or mixed of the New York City contact tracing program. Julie, go ahead.

Julie: Oh, thank you so much for that. Here in New Jersey, when this all started, I signed up for the Johns Hopkins Coursera course. It was extremely sensitive to any kind of personal information about the people you're contacting, whether there's someone who just received a positive coronavirus test, or if they were people that had been exposed. There's a whole separate script for each of those two categories.

The third section of the course was all about sensitivity and personal information, how to ask a question to elicit the information you need without alienating the person you're talking to. I thought it extremely helpful. I think that the description that your guest just talked about getting to people's sexual orientation would have been breaking the cardinal rule of contact tracing. I am shocked that something like that has occurred and that obviously is in no way important information for the contact tracer to have.

That's just ridiculous and I'm surprised that is part of the script that New York City contact tracing is using. I signed up to be a contact tracer in New Jersey, and I haven't yet been called up. I hope I am. They're run out of Rutgers. Rutgers is the one that's heading the contact tracing program. I will have to go through another course with them if I get called up. Just taking the online course with Coursera, I think that's the one that Bloomberg is paying for and representing to Johns Hopkins. I hope they're going to use them as a baseline.

Brian: Really interesting, Julie and I'm going to leave it there, and please call us again. A couple of things from Julie's call, Sharon. One, your article also cites Johns Hopkins as having developed a contact tracing best practices database of some kind. The caller does ask coincidentally if the New York system conforms to the Johns Hopkins standards. I'm curious if you know the answer to that.

Also, on this question of asking somebody sexual orientation or other personal demographic information, the caller says it's invasive and so it shouldn't be asked because it puts off the people from actually answering your content questions. On the other hand, I could see why they would want to know demographically who's most at risk for the virus because it's important that we learn about the disparate impacts that we now know exist.

Sharon: Every contact tracer had to take that same course that Julie was talking about, the Bloomberg course. I did take most of that course myself to see what it was. Yes, she's right. It talked about developing trust and being empathetic listening. That's why it was so shocking to a lot of the tracers when they started and I remember these tracers-- These are good jobs. These are $60,000 a year for the most part city jobs that they got. A lot of these people have master's degrees in public health.

They were very surprised when all of a sudden they were following a script that a lot of them didn't find effective. Then also weren't sure how much they were allowed to go off-script because Optum is a call center operation that has things like adherence scores that check how often you're online and how long your coffee break is and that kind of thing. They initially weren't sure how much they were allowed to even go off-scripted at all.

In terms of improvements, things have definitely improved in terms of how people are reaching them. They've been advised now that they can go off-script. Those invasive or what people felt were invasive demographic questions have been moved to the end of the call, and are now more optional than required.

Brian: I see. Is that to say that the wanted Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins Coursera course methodology was really not that good?

Sharon: Maybe I misunderstood the question. The way that the script was set up with those demographic questions at the front was not similar to the way contact tracing was described in the John Hopkins course, but all of the tracers had to take the Johns Hopkins course. When I asked the city about this, who developed the script, they said, "Oh, the Department of Health experts develop the script in conjunction with Health and Hospitals."

I don't know where that disconnect happened, but after six weeks when they finally started to elicit feedback from tracers, they did start to make these adjustments to try to make it more effective.

Brian: Also joining us now for a few minutes is WNYC's Fred Mogul who's reporting on the departure of Dr. Barbot, the Health Commissioner, who resigned apparently in protest yesterday of the Health Department being cut out of the center of the contact tracing program by Mayor De Blasio. Hi, Fred.

Fred: Hi, Brian.

Brian: Now, you report that back in the spring at the height of the pandemic in New York City, Dr. Barbot gave up on contact tracing saying there were just too many cases to trace back who got it from whom. Was that a controversial decision at the time?

Fred: That's my understanding from some insiders, and I'd be interested to know whether Sharon's heard similar things. I think there were legitimate policy debates early on as things were catching wildfire. The systems were being overwhelmed even ahead of that, even in the anticipation of X, the writing was on the wall really by relatively early in March, late February.

They're legitimate policy debates, but I think people I talked to were surprised that they threw in the towel. They said as it picked up momentum, but there's just too many people to do contact tracing. This isn't the setting the environment, it isn't the best use of resources. There's a point at which she requests more funding to hire more people. When my people say, there are actually all kinds of people within the vast recesses of the Health Department doing other things who frankly could have been reassigned.

Now, contact tracing in that setting would have been wildly imperfect. You would not have gotten everyone traced back, but my sources say, you would have gotten some actionable information all the same, and to not even have tried it was a big policy failure and a big operational failure.

Brian: Did she and the Mayor disagree about that contact tracing decision at the time or did that inform his decision not to have the Health Department do the big program that started in June?

Fred: I'm not sure about at that level whether it was internal to the Health Department, but certainly I think there was, in my sources estimation a flat-footedness of which this was part within the Health Department. It extends to the internal developments of protocols for coronavirus testing and slow-moving, slow-walking and adherence to real bureaucratic niceties that my people told me were excessive given the exigencies and given the circumstances.

I think it's a piece of a lot of problems that were there. To be sure, though, we've heard time and again, that the Mayor is not fantastic about working with experts. You've seen a steady exodus of people from the Health Department, from various policy shops in different agencies. I think it's of a piece with that.

Brian: Based on your reporting, Fred, what's the overall public health world consensus, if there is one, on Dr. Barbot versus Mayor De Blasio? Is she the effective pistol of public health and he's the Machiavellian politician standing in her way, or is it more complicated than that?

Fred: I think a lot of people have rushed to her defense. You've seen former health commissioners, Frieden and Bassett backing her up. People at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia. I think your alma mater, if I'm not mistaken, rushing to say that the Health Department really should be the repository for contact tracing, and it's outrageous that it was moved to the Health and Hospitals Corporation. There were, according to my sources, legitimate misgivings within city hall about how well Barbot and Health Department were doing, how well they acquitted themselves in the first weeks and months of the pandemic.

Brian: Is there any gender or ethnic background angle to this as far as your reporting reveals? Is anyone saying about how her judgement was received in her tenure in general by Mayor De Blasio and if it fits anything of a gendered or other demographic pattern in this administration?

Fred: You have heard people saying that and they criticized his ability to work with women, be they of color or not. You had Carlina Rivera from the city council, talking about this. I don't know. It's hard for me to really second-guess that. I think the larger knock on him is taking advice of people, of women, of men, of people of color. He brought in a lot of women of color and people of color in the administration. When he failed to follow them, those are the people who-- He's alienated people who've left the administration. You could invite them and some of them would come on the air and spill perhaps a little bit more on that.

Brian: I happen to have a former administration official coming on tomorrow, Maya Wiley, who's now considering running for mayor herself for next year. Maybe that will come up. WNYC's Fred Mogul, thank you very much for a few minutes.

Fred: Thank you.

Brian: Still with a few minutes more with Sharon Otterman, New York Times metro correspondent who's reporting on the effectiveness and the internal mess that's being reported by workers at the New York City coronavirus contact tracing program. Let's take another phone call. It looks like we have a contact tracer calling in. Francis in The Bronx, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling. Hi, Francis.

Francis: Hey, Mr. Lehrer. It's nice to be on the show. I actually have read Ms. Otterman's article and I think her assertion is antithetical to the purpose of her article. So much of it is actually focused on the fact that there are so many problems with the program. Actually, many of them have been continually solved and fixed along the way and addressed and they continue to be addressed.

One of the things that she cites most is that we need to have trust in order to do our job. This article, I would assert is anti-New York and anti the program because the article itself undermines the program's trust with New York City and New York City citizens. I think that this article is actually endangering public health in New York.

Brian: Would it not enhance trust to report accurately on problems that exist so they can then fix them and build trust?

Francis: If indeed the reporting is accurate and current. This program was launched with 3,000 workers [inaudible 00:30:03] each of us had [inaudible 00:30:07] by our experience here in New York. All wanting to come forward to taking care of New Yorkers.

Brian: Are you saying you it started with-

Francis: Each of those-

Brian: -a problem-- Just, I'll ask you a follow-up question then you can say whatever you want. Are you saying that the problems documented in the article were from earlier on in the program which only started June 1st and that they've gotten a lot better?

Francis: I apologize the connection sometimes is not so great here, but yes, we are continuing, every day we have changes in this program that we have to juggle and adapt to. From different [unintelligible 00:30:51], I honestly know the program is running through many channels [inaudible 00:30:55] the hospital department also is in there. There's a city government. I'm sure that there is also politicians from the federal government who are also interested in the program and putting pressure from the top. Then you have all these 3,000 contact tracers sitting at home alone in their New York apartment. [inaudible 00:31:15].

Brian: Now, you're breaking up so bad that I'm going to have to go but I think I understood what you were saying there at the end that you have these 3,000 people basically sitting alone in their apartments, trying to do the work while the people at the various levels of management are trying to consistently improve the system because that's their job and they really care. Sharon, obviously that's in part a critique of your article. What do you want to say? What were you thinking as you were listening to Francis?

Sharon: Francis is right that this particular article is a look back at the rollout based on the early parts of the program. Some of these problems are improving. I think we do make that point in the article that things are getting better. The reason that we decided to do a story about how difficult the rollout was, was because of the way it was framed politically that we're going to give this to Health and Hospitals because they are the organization with the capacity to do this.

Because that was made such a big deal of, we thought the reality going on behind the scenes was so different from how it was being portrayed on the podium that that was an important story. We do want to follow up as things improve and get better and of course, document that as well.

Brian: Let's take one more call before we run out of time. This is going to be from someone who was contact traced and didn't like it, I don't think, Suzanne in Connecticut, you're on WNYC. Hi, Suzanne. Thank you for calling in.

Suzanne: Hi, Brian. Thanks for doing what you do. I hope you can hear me.

Brian: I can hear fine.

Suzanne: Okay, great. My situation is a little different than what Francis was explaining because I had an opportunity to take a trip on an airplane from New Haven, Connecticut, to Buffalo, New York, via Philadelphia which was the only way I could do the route. I checked before I left and went anywhere. Nothing about those cities, nothing about the transport was going to be considered hot zone.

Now, my residence is New York City and my driver's license says New York City. When I returned via Philadelphia to New Haven, I found myself being contacted mercilessly, and I still am being contacted mercilessly on the phone and on the text, anonymously indicating that it had been brought to their attention that I had traveled from a hot zone into New York City and that I was obligated to self-quarantine and that I should hit C on my texts in order to confirm that I understand what my obligation and on and on and on.

Well, I started my full dive of calling as many people as I possibly could. Over five days, it's been now five days. Five days and I have yet to find an individual who has an answer as to how I get myself off of their list. I found myself being so frustrated and thinking it through I finally had said to myself, "You know what? The arrogance that went into the preparation of whatever this system is never, ever, ever considered, that they might be wrong. Because not considering that they might be wrong, this allowed any opportunity for anyone to tell me how to undo what exists."

Brian: Did you succeed in getting in touch with anyone to say what you said here?

Suzanne: As far as to get a young lady and I have lots of names and numbers. I got a young lady who said to me, "There's a website you can go to and at the end of it, there's 150 names, you can start calling them." I just said this is borderlines harassment because in the instance I don't comply, and for any reason, let's say I was in an accident, let's say some circumstance happened and then it was mistakenly determined that I was not playing nice with the other children in the sandbox. I don't want to know what the wrath of these zealots would be.

Brian: Right. This is, to be clear, a State of Connecticut contact tracing program, is that right?

Suzanne: No, this is the State of New York and [unintelligible 00:35:50] Hospital.

Brian: Oh, it is. Suzanne, thank you for that story. Now, we're almost out of time Sharon but that's a very interesting story and I wonder how it relates to anything that you reported about how this works.

Sharon: I think part of what she's describing, it has to do with the call center nature of the program. If she doesn't answer the phone, then it's going to go back into the queue and some other tracer is going to have to call her two hours later to see if she can answer the phone again. That's why you can have five or six people calling the same person and the tracers themselves said that people were complaining that it began to feel like harassment.

To Francis's point, they have been improving that and I think the traces that I talked to towards the end of six weeks that I was reporting on said they were getting it under control with how many times one person was called. It is a problem. If you don't call the people in your queue, you might get dinged for low adherence scores because you didn't call everyone in your queue so they have to.

I just want to say just so people understand the test and trace this 3,000 people that were hired, about 1,700 of them are called case monitors. They just follow up with cases once you identify them, make sure they have resources and check to see if they're quarantining. The other 1,200 people are all new hires, the vast majority of which have never contact traced before. It's been a huge learning curve for everybody and that would be expected for any program of this size.

My question as a reporter was, who is doing the analysis of the information? Who's doing the difficult work that requires all the experience and that is still the Department of Health. That's yet another layer of difficulty because if you think of the test and trace these 3,000 people, it's kind of the army of privates. The generals, the lieutenants, those are still Department of Health experts. That's yet another layer of bureaucracy as who can analyze the information to find clusters to do actionable things with the information. That's the part that we're starting to be really interested in looking at now. What can we learn from the information that is now being gathered?

Brian: Right and thinking about the last caller's call, on the one hand, I understand why it's frustrating to her, her experience, for all the reasons that she said, on the other hand, so much of the talk in the coverage has been about how it's hard to enforce this quarantine program that Governor Cuomo announced for people coming in from high-risk states. We could just as easily be having a conversation about that and why aren't they doing more to follow up on people who come from hotspot states, sounds like she wasn't really in a hotspot state so that was an issue.

When people really are coming from hotspot states, maybe it's reassuring to know they're trying to follow up in an aggressive way although it sounds like not in an effective way. Sharon Otterman, New York Times metro correspondent reporting on the city's test and trace program. Thank you so much.

 

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