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The city has been able to successfully trace approximately 90 percent of its more than 5,900 coronaviruses cases, Paterson health official Dr. Paul Persaud said in a recent New York Times article.
"Twenty miles to the west of New York City, Paterson, a poor, largely nonwhite city of about 150,000, has been tracing the virus at a level that could be the envy of larger cities," the report says.
Two dozen workers who had been trained last year by the Board of Health in communicable disease investigations joined the regular team of two disease detectives in mid-March, the NYT reports.
Fifty of the board's 60 employees now comprise the COVID-19 task force, who work together to monitor all of the city's cases.
Placing calls to residents who have been exposed to COVID-19 could be the most difficult part of the job, the report says.
A city health official last week was tasked with breaking the news to an Uber driver that he recently tested positive, The Times says.
"The Uber driver had lost his sense of smell and taste but otherwise felt fine," the article says.
"He kept driving passengers in this small, industrial city until last week, when he took a test for the coronavirus."
The driver gave the health official a list of eight phone numbers, belonging to his most recent passengers.
The city health officials called the passengers, one of them a factory worker who was told only that he came in contact with a confirmed positive case and that he needed to self-isolate, the New York Times article says.
The man questioned who, but due to privacy laws, the health officials could not disclose the information, saying only that he had to self-isolate.
Paterson has four coronavirus testing sites. Its mayor, Andre Sayegh, is among thousands of city residents who recovered fully from coronavirus.
"We are driving down the number of confirmed COVID cases but we cannot get comfortable," he said on Facebook
"What we are doing is working but we still have work to do."
Click here for the full New York Times article.
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