Malware attack and skyrocketing cases complicating some contact tracing, test results

By Andy Gardner

CANTON. A recent malware attack and a steadily increasing number of COVID-19 cases are having an impact on getting people their test results and contact tracers doing investigations of positive cases.

Drs. Andrew Williams and Dana McGuire discussed those issues with the St. Lawrence County Board of Legislators Services Committee during their Monday, Nov. 9 meeting. Dr. Williams is president of the St. Lawrence County Board of Health. Dr. McGuire is director of the St. Lawrence County Public Health Department.

The recent malware attack temporarily shut down computer systems at hospitals run by St. Lawrence Health System in Massena, Potsdam and Gouverneur. That left the county and the hospital system “in an awful position,” Williams said, which led to some people seeing delays in getting back test results, and some positive cases not being immediately contacted by health officials.

“The malware that infected the St. Lawrence Health System really kind of added a kind of chaos that was not expected. Systems that were up and running reasonably smoothly were derailed,” Williams said. “Everyone in the medical community recognizes testing is a key part of our response.”

McGuire’s department oversees the contact tracing when someone tests positive for COVID-19. Health officials will ask the patient who they’ve recently been in close contact with, and those people are notified that they need to enter precautionary quarantine and be tested for the coronavirus.

“With the hospital system being down, we don’t get test results quite as quickly as we were. We’re not alerted to them the same way as we were. The communication changed,” McGuire said. “When the system was down, we don’t get addresses. We don’t get phone numbers. All this takes a little more time to just get ahold of people.”

Dr. Williams warned that people who get tested should not have a “no news is good news” attitude if they don’t get prompt results.

“No news is no news. People should expect to hear a result. Hopefully a result that’s negative. If it’s positive, they need to hear that, too,” he said. “The standard is people should be hearing their test results, even if it’s a negative.”

On top of the malware attack, the recent rapid spread of the disease is giving contact tracers a lot more work to get through, more than they’ve seen since the pandemic started.

“With the rise we had so quickly, we had like 25 to 30 cases to be doing investigations on. While we get through the cases, it does take us longer,” Dr. McGuire said.

She said they are passing some of the cases to the state Department of Health for contact tracing.

“You can see that the rise for people who are in the mandatory quarantine has skyrocketed,” she said. “Each case we’re seeing now has more and more contacts. We’re kind of seeing that due to the gatherings.”

“Getting all that information does take time,” she added.

She said a further complication is people not giving a full accounting of their whereabouts to contact tracers. She said they won’t get angry or be judgmental when people have attended a gathering or engaged in other behavior that health officials say could lead to the virus spreading. They need the full picture in order to prevent the disease from spreading even more.

“People are not really giving us the whole story,” she said. “It’s not up to our office to judge any of the activities. We are here to try and contain it. If we don’t have that information, we can’t do that.”

Dr. Williams said St. Lawrence County is quicker than other places in the country in getting case investigations and contact tracing done.

He pointed, as an example, to Centers for Disease Control literature about the state of Delaware. He said the document says, “median time to do case identification was 6 to 8 days.” However, “that is not the standard we use here.”

“What we expect is we’d love for people to get contacted in 6 to 8 minutes. That doesn’t happen,” he said. “We’re contacting people faster than many other places.”