SAN FRANCISCO — Despite experiencing one of the country’s largest outbreaks of monkeypox, San Francisco’s health department has pulled back on contact tracing – a standard public health practice in combating viral disease – for those who have been infected, this news organization has learned.
The revelation comes amid successive declarations of public emergencies over the monkeypox virus by the federal government, the state and San Francisco Mayor London Breed, whose director of public health announced at the end of July it was “imperative that we mobilize city resources rapidly” to curb its spread.
But San Francisco has never announced publicly whether it is tracing the contacts of infected residents in order to detect and control the spread of a monkeypox outbreak that has affected hundreds, and emails obtained by this news organization indicate that health department officials are reluctant to answer questions about their strategy. It turns out that for this city, contact tracing — a key endeavor during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and an approach epidemiologists say should work well against monkeypox — plays only a small part.
