A number of geneticists are concerned that they only learned from a tweet from a colleague that they might have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, Nature News reports.
The University of Utah's Clement Chow tweeted last week that he had been in the ICU grappling with COVID-19 and that, it adds, sparked among researchers who had been at a meeting with him not only concerns about Chow's health but also about their own exposure and who they might have in turn exposed to the disease.
"The fact that we learned about this from a Tweet points to a failure of our department of health," Nels Elde, an evolutionary geneticist at University of Utah, tells Nature News.
Nature News notes that public health departments in the US have been emphasizing social distancing as a means of slowing viral spread rather than contact tracing that other countries have been pursuing, though those policies vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Researchers from that meeting are now self-quarantining, it adds.