The Imperial County Public Health Department shared this week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is deploying a team to Imperial County to provide support for contact tracing, binational case investigations, hospital infection prevention and control and reporting, data management, and planning. The CDC team will consist of five staff, including epidemiologists and others. Some of the team members arrived earlier in the week, while others will be arriving today.

Paula Kriner, Epidemiology Manager, stated, “Our Department welcomes the additional support from the CDC. This is an unprecedented time for our community and having the assistance from our federal partners allows us to continue serving our community with the highest level of professionalism that they deserve as we respond to the pandemic.”

The Public Health Department is participating in the California Department of Public Health’s new program for case investigation and contact tracing called CalCONNECT. In addition to more than a dozen local case investigators who have been trained, the state is in the process of assigning and training a total of 10 bilingual case investigators and 10 bilingual contact tracers to investigate cases, identify contacts to those cases, and follow up with the contacts.

Imperial County remains in Stage 2 – Lower Risk under the Roadmap to Recovery mandated by guidelines established in the California Resilience Roadmap by Governor Gavin Newsom. For information on COVID-19, please visit www.icphd.org or contact the COVID-19 Information Line at 442-265-6700. Media interested in speaking to CDC Media Relations can call (404) 693-3286 or email media@cdc.gov