AS COVID-19 has rampaged across the United States, government officials have struggled with the basic steps needed to contain the pandemic.
Should everyone get tested, or just people with symptoms? Should public health officials require Americans to wear masks or not? What’s the best way to track the infection, particularly in marginalized communities?
For one set of public health experts, the heated debates over testing, wearing masks and contact tracing were eerily familiar — as odd as it might seem, these are similar to arguments that officials and academics working to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases have been having for decades as they’ve worked to bring down the rates of infections like HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. It may seem incongruous — even inappropriate — to compare a respiratory disease to a sexually transmitted infection.
After all, it’s emotionally harder (if logistically easier) for someone to tell a contact tracer who
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