Contact tracers will account for thousands of new jobs in the coming weeks and months, and this free online course from Johns Hopkins teaches people how to succeed in the role in just 6 hours
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Mara Leighton
Aug 3, 2020, 21:03 IST
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The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health has created an online course that teaches students how to become a contact tracer, a public health role that helps slow the spread of COVID-19.
"COVID-19 Contact Tracing" takes six hours to complete and teaches students how to interview people with suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19, and provides guidance for self-quarantining.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health has created an online introductory course that teaches students the skills needed to become contact tracers, which is a role many see as vital to slowing the spread of COVID-19.
Contact tracers work with patients with a suspected or confirmed infection to identify the people whom they've had close contact with throughout the period when they may have been infectious. Contract tracers then provide guidance to patients and their contacts on appropriate measures such as self-quarantining in order to flatten the curve.
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Overview of the class "COVID-19 Contact Tracing"
The class "COVID-19 Contact Tracing" is available online through Coursera, and is taught by Emily Gurley, PhD, MPH, an infectious disease epidemiologist with a background in outbreak response. Gurley developed the course in tandem with colleagues from the Bloomberg School, including Tolbert Nyenswah, the former incident commander for the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.
This class, available free through the rest of the year, covers the science of SARS-CoV-2, including its infectious period, the clinical presentation of COVID-19, and why contact tracing can be an effective public health intervention. Students will gain an understanding of how contact tracing work is done, including how to build rapport with patients, identify their contacts, and support both the patients and their contacts to halt transmission in their communities.
Students will learn strategies through simulations to overcome some of the most common challenges contract tracers face, such as reluctance by patients to self-quarantine for two weeks. Lessons also tackle important ethical considerations regarding contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine, to help students become comfortable with sensitive dynamics.
What are other free or affordable e-learning classes related to COVID-19?
To similarly meet the demand for specialized skills quickly, online learning sites have also responded with relaxed paywall restrictions and new, affordable, and highly specific content to address some of the pandemic's fundamentally technical challenges.
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