th minimal or no dyspnea — are young, relatively healthy people who might not otherwise present for medical care at all. We try to evaluate everyone in the household when we are visiting elders, and we frequently discover people with oxygen saturations of 80% or lower who did not know they were infected," the NEJM study said.
Like most other aggressive and effective public health measures, this process was tedious and involved a lot of dedication and hard work for the people on the reservations. However, they have managed to cut the death toll down largely due to their ability to get infected individuals out of circulation due to the proactive use of both contact tracing and pulse oximeters.
"Our community’s case fatality rate so far is 1.1%, less than half the rate reported for the rest of Arizona," the authors of the NEJM study wrote. "Running this kind of operation is difficult. It is staff-intensive and requires clinicians to spend long days in the hot sun. But we believe that our process has yielded positive outcomes."
Their success begs the question: Why is contact tracing not better implemented in other places?
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