The Virginia Department of Health said Thursday it’s searching for bilingual candidates as it hires 1,300 contact tracers.  It says it will deploy tracking software and enforceable quarantine orders alongside these tracers to more aggressively counter the spread of the virus.

“VDH is very interested in creating a diverse workforce that identifies with the communities being served,” said Mona Bector, the VDH deputy commissioner of administration. “We are pretty open to bringing people in and training them.”

Health experts say contact tracing is vital to containing the pandemic, as one person could potentially infect as many as three people. The risk of contagion is increasing as early social distancing measures expire in some local jurisdictions.   WAMU’s Martin Austermuhle reported the District and Maryland are also hiring hundreds of contact tracers.

The ability to speak more than one language is paramount in Virginia because COVID-19 has a disproportionate impact on lower-income communities that often include immigrants. Close to half the state’s cases are Hispanic or Latino patients; in Northern Virginia their share is even higher.

In a briefing, Bector said the health department planned to hire in “weeks not months” for positions including contact tracers, case investigators, and data analysts. She estimated that some could start work next week. She said they would augment the work of about 129 people who already tracked other diseases before the pandemic, and 300 health department employees who had been reassigned to trace contacts and would soon be able to return to their regular jobs. To apply for the jobs, she recommended a list of staffing agencies issued by her department.

Asked if the VDH would provide health insurance for its new contact tracers, spokeswoman Julie Grimes wrote that hiring would take place indirectly via staffing agencies.

“The employer is the staffing agency. Health insurance would be through the employer,” she wrote DCist/WAMU.

Contact tracers work by speaking to COVID-19 patients to find out who else they might have infected, said Marhsall Vogt, an epidemiologist with the VDH division of immunization. Then, the tracers notify the contacts, advise them to quarantine, monitor them for symptoms, and help them access services like grocery deliveries to help them maintain their isolation.

“We find that most people are very compliant with the process for quarantining if they’re a contact, or isolating if they are ill,” he said. If people are not compliant, he said contact tracers explain the importance of following directions.

“If at that point the person is non-compliant, there are measures through law in Virginia where the [State Health] Commissioner could issue an order of isolation or quarantine that would be enforceable, and we do have processes in place to do that,” he said.

Alongside this human effort, Bector said the department was in the process of acquiring several software programs to help contain the virus. She said the department expected to announce within days a symptom checker made by Buoy Health of Boston; on Thursday its site had a dedicated page for Virginia residents to check whether their symptoms pointed to a potential infection.

For those exposed to the virus, the VDH will use Sara Alert, Bector said, which enables patients to report their temperature and symptoms on their phones so that doctors can coordinate their care, and public health agencies can monitor the data. It is made by the Mitre Corporation, headquartered in McLean, Va. and Bedford, Mass.

Bector said her department was also finalizing an agreement to launch a proximity tracker app, which would use Google and Apple platforms to alert people if they were near someone who was infected. She said it would take at least three weeks to be operational, and that the department was also doing due diligence to protect users’ privacy. This software would be opt-in, Bector said.

“Any data that’s collected is on a very secure cloud-based system which is for government,” she said, noting it was protected by the HIPAA Privacy Rule. “We’re not trying to force people into it. We would encourage people to use it because it helps protect them and others.”

The hiring and technology will be paid for by $58 million of funding that was approved for Virginia’s pandemic response in the federal CARES Act, said Megan Healy, chief workforce advisor to Gov. Ralph Northam (D).

Virginia is expanding its contact tracing as the state health department stands up free testing sites; in Loudoun County Wednesday, tests reportedly ran out hours ahead of the 6 p.m. closing time. Daily tests are approaching the goal of 10,000 that Northam set; however, they are still falling short. More testing is planned for May 25 in Alexandria and for Annandale and Bailey’s Crossroads in the coming days, according to Fairfax County Health Department spokeswoman Tina Dale.