PORT ANGELES – Local Health officials hope to have a team in place by May to track down any coronavirus cases in Clallam County.

Public Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry Unthank says she has 20 people now trained to help track virus exposures. She hopes to have another 20 volunteers ready in the next three weeks.

“What we are working on now is training up local volunteers to do contact tracing. So there’s some folks who are retired from epidemiology or retired doctors or nurses or first responders who would like to help. Our goal is to train 40 folks who could do contact tracing on call as we need them with supervision from our department and then also to train some folks to do some degree of case management for those who are doing quarantine or isolation at home. I actually feel pretty confident that we’ll have all of that in place by May 4th.”

Contact tracing uses trained staff to interview people who have been diagnosed with a contagious disease to figure out who they may have recently been in contact with. Then, they go tell those people they may have been exposed, sometimes encouraging them to quarantine.

Unthank says the key to getting things reopened is to test and quickly address any new COVID-19 positive cases.

“The goal is eventually to get to the point that anyone regardless of whatever category you might belong to can get tested if they have symptoms and as soon as they have symptoms.  We think that that should be on the horizon in the next week or so. We’re waiting on a very large order that the state has put in, but it hasn’t arrived yet. But if and when they do get that, then we should be able to expand testing to everybody.“

Unthank says Clallam County has done well to contain the original outbreak, and now its time to prep for moving ahead. She says she expects parts of the economy will open in roughly two-week periods once the reopen starts.

But Unthank says there will probably always be some restrictions on social distancing and reminders of better hygiene in place until there is a vaccine and they believe more than 50 percent of the population is immune.