Integrating social services with disease investigation: A randomized trial of COVID-19 high-touch contact tracing

COVID-19 exposed and exacerbated health disparities, and a core challenge has been how to adapt pandemic response and public health in light of these disproportionate health burdens. Responding to this challenge, the County of Santa Clara Public Health Department designed a model of “high-touch” contact tracing that integrated social services with disease investigation, providing continued support and resource linkage for clients from structurally vulnerable communities. We report results from a cluster randomized trial of 5,430 cases from February to May 2021 to assess the ability of high-touch contact tracing to aid with isolation and quarantine. Using individual-level data on resource referral and uptake outcomes, we find that the intervention, randomized assignment to the high-touch program, increased the referral rate to social services by 8.4% (95% confidence interval, 0.8%-15.9%) and the uptake rate by 4.9% (-0.2%-10.0%), with the most pronounced increases in referrals and uptake of food assistance. These findings demonstrate that social services can be effectively combined with contact tracing to better promote health equity, demonstrating a novel path for the future of public health.