Global Research

The US federal and state governments are now hiring “Contact Tracers” to track those who are infected with the Coronavirus. The Daily Beast, a liberal online news site claims that in order to reopen businesses and institutions, the government needs to hire thousands of Contact Tracers, the article ‘Contact Tracing Is Vital to Reopening the Country. These States Are Recruiting Thousands’ calls for a mass hiring of Contact Tracers since “health experts are pressing more than ever the need for contact tracing”the article claims that “It’s a tool that proved effective in past epidemics like SARS and Ebola, and it’s regarded as essential to safely reopening the country with the looming threat of higher surges in cases.” Currently, there are around 2,000 contact tracers or disease detectives, but they are estimating that the US workforce will need between 100,000 to 300,000 contact tracers, and that is just the beginning:

Former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden estimates that the country needs at least “several hundred thousand” in order to effectively trace the network of those infected with COVID-19. The National Association of County and City Health Officials recommends 15 tracers per 100,000 people in normal times, increasing to 30 tracers during a pandemic.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that contact tracers will “identify an infected person and track down every person and location that might have been exposed “for a prolonged period of time” during the incubation period. They’re not told the identity of who might have exposed them.” Then contact tracers will notify potential carriers through “via phone, email, or social media” the article claims. “But a big challenge is that state and local public health departments need a huge amount of people and resources to conduct widespread tracing.” There will be various agencies that will be hiring this new breed of “professionals”. The Daily Beast mentioned Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration chief under President Trump reportedly claimed in a recent interview with NPR that “as many as 180,000 contact tracers will be needed “if we want to enter into the fall with the kinds of resources we need to try to trace infection to prevent large outbreaks.” Another mainstream media network who knows how to put the fear in people was published by CNN ‘Experts say the US needs teams ready to hunt down new Covid-19 cases. But so far, there aren’t nearly enough’, “hunt down” sounds like they will be hunting down criminals. “Contact tracing is a widely used method in public health that relies on identifying every person who tests positive with an infection, isolating them, and then finding anyone that person could have infected” CNN reported. It seems that Trump is also on board with a massive hiring phase which would give him an opportunity to claim that he has provided jobs while the job market is in a downfall:

Trump unveiled a three-phase return-to-normal plan to all 50 state governors on Thursday. It outlines steps each state should take once they meet a certain threshold for number of cases declining over two weeks and certain level of capacity and ability to care for all patients in hospitals. The 17-page document makes a brief mention of contact tracing, saying states should have the ability to do it, but does not offer guidance on how to do it, how many people will be needed to do it, or explain how the federal government will help build up contact tracing systems

Many states are quickly moving into this direction. An NBC News report, ‘Inside an ‘army’ of COVID-19 contact tracers in Massachusetts’ said that “the program in Massachusetts has a virtual workforce of 1,000 contact tracers. Roughly 9,000 applied in the first 24 hours, and the job pays the rate of a federal census worker, $20 to 25 an hour.” NBCinterviewed Christian Arthur, who was formally employed at a addiction recovery center in South Boston until he found a job as a contact tracer:

Christian Arthur was out of a job when the addiction recovery center in South Boston where he worked closed last month. It took him two weeks to find a new one — as a “contact tracer” on the virtual front lines of Massachusetts’ effort to halt the spread of COVID-19. “There’s an army of us,” Arthur, 29, told NBC News

To justify these positions, NBC made sure to mention that contact tracing has been around for some time:

Contact tracing has long been used in the U.S. and other countries to help curb the spread of such diseases as tuberculosis, cholera and Ebola. It has also been used to great effect to mitigate the virus in countries like South Korea and Germany, public health experts say

Under Massachusetts Governor, Charlie Baker, the chief medical officer of the Boston-based Partners in Health Dr. Joia Mukherjee is in charge of the contact tracing program. The president and executive director of Partners in Health, Ophelia Dahl, was recently on a Clinton Global Initiative University online video discussion with Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton with governors Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom about contact tracing.  Dahl and both governors all basically said the same thing, and that is a significant “army” of contact tracers is needed to fight Covid-19.  Dr. Joia Mukherjee is currently overseeing the recruiting, training and the deployment of newly hired contact tracers throughout the state of Massachusetts:

The program in Massachusetts has a virtual workforce of 1,000 contact tracers. Roughly 9,000 applied in the first 24 hours, and the job pays the rate of a federal census worker, $20 to 25 an hour, according to Mukherjee. The job is done exclusively by phone and the workers are trained in handling what could be difficult conversations

NBC News mentioned was Krysta Cass, a 2010 West Point graduate and a former orthopedic physician assistant who was an Army officer for eight years in Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East before she became a supervisor in the Massachusetts tracing program:

Cass now oversees a team of 100 contact tracers, divided into 10 units with two to three case investigators in each. The case investigators interview those who tested positive and then pass along the list of contacts and places they went to the contact tracers in the unit.

“Most military recruits volunteer for public service in response to a global need,” said Cass, whose team focuses on Boston. “The people I’m working with are so similar. They care about the mission”

The state of California under its governor, Gavin Newsom wants to increase the number of contact tracers to at least 20,000 according to a report produced by CBS13.com, a news network based in Sacramento, California. During a recent press conference, Newsom said that “This is all foundational so that we can more quickly move to modify our stay-at-home order.” The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) are now offering Online contact tracer academies the report said. The Daily Beast said that “Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in late April that the state would immediately launch a “nation-leading” coronavirus contact tracing program, with between 6,400 and 17,000 tracers—equivalent to 30 per 100,000 residents.” Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is partnering with Governor Cuomo to collaborate within the tri-state area in the East coast “The program, in collaboration with former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s charity, “will be done in coordination with the downstate region as well as New Jersey and Connecticut.”

The main question that has to asked is what if the government, multi-national corporations including major pharmaceuticals and the private billionaire class and others with special interests might find this new contact tracing model appealing? With billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates supporting and funding Covid-19 tracing programs and mass vaccination campaigns in the US and around the world, individual liberties are slowly being taken away. This same system can be used to create an “army” to combat any perceived crisis they see fit.  What if they targeted anti-war groups, civil rights activists, anti-GMO groups to pro-2nd Amendment organizations, to regular citizens who hold different political views? The point is that they can use a tracing program model for almost any situation they see as a threat to their agenda.

It definitely reminds me of the history of Nazi Germany with their creation of “the brown shirts” or The Sturmabteilung, a legion of both the unemployed and the underemployed German people, high-school students and others who became “political soldiers.” The brown shirts were originally created to protect rallies who supported the Nazi Party and fought against those who opposed them including the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) known as the Red Front Fighters League, the Romani, Jews and others.

With an increasing unemployment rate with more than 30 million people who had lost their jobs so far since the Covid-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic thus forcing businesses to close and companies to lay-off a massive amount of workers in an already fragile economy. It is estimated that more than 18.6% of the labor force is now unemployed. The more realistic picture of the unemployment numbers should be measured in U-6 unemployment rate because it counts people who have given up looking for jobs and those that are working part-time but would prefer working full-time and are considered underemployed. The Federal Bank of St. Louis (see this) states that the U6 unemployment rate as of April stands at 22.8% and it could be allot worse.

The US population will certainly face an economic decline and a pending world war with one of Washington’s adversaries, but one of the immediate effects they will encounter is long-term unemployment. The unemployment numbers are only going to increase in coming months and even years as more businesses close or lay-off workers due to the already weak economy and Covid-19 pandemic scare. A recession has essentially started and its starting to take its toll on the working class. Many people will apply for these contact tracing jobs in desperate times, and a certain percentage of government-trained recruits will violate the civil rights of ordinary citizens just like those incidents in the past that occurred with the TSA at US airports. The US government and the 50 states of the union are actively hiring a new army of contact tracers as the unemployment numbers gets worse, creating a complete totalitarian police state.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his blog, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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