August 20, 2020
The Hon. Steuart Pittman
Anne Arundel County Executive

The Hon. Bernard C. “Jack” Young
Mayor, City of Baltimore

The Hon. Johnny A. Olszewski, Jr.
Baltimore County Executive

The Hon. Jan H. Gardner
Frederick County Executive

The Hon. Calvin Ball
Howard County Executive

The Hon. Marc Elrich
Montgomery County Executive

Re: Request for Contact Tracing and Testing COVID-19 data and information
Dear County and City Leaders:
Thank you for your correspondence, dated August 14, 2020, to Governor Larry Hogan. The
Maryland Department of Health (MDH) has consistently been committed to providing accurate
and timely COVID-19 data and information to the public. We urge your local health departments
to work with our staff to improve our COVID-19 response in a collaborative fashion, rather than
talking about it through a correspondence campaign.
Expanded testing and contact tracing are two of the four pillars of Governor Hogan’s Maryland
Strong: Roadmap to Recovery. MDH continues to make substantial progress in these pillars and
will continue efforts to make information accessible to the public.
MDH continues to expand its public and private lab capacity, as well as number of testing sites.
MDH has expanded testing to over 210 community-based testing sites, including several highvolume regional testing sites. With the increased accessibility to testing and our team’s
collaboration with public and private labs, we continue to reduce lag time between testing and
resulting. Please see the attached submission to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention from July for more information about Maryland’s COVID-19 testing strategy
projections for July-December 2020. As we develop and finalize our contracts and learn more
about the use of the two U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved COVID-19
antigen test platforms, we will provide additional information.
Statewide deployment of contact tracing began in early June 2020, and involves extensive
coordination between MDH, local health departments, and the state contact tracing call center
(staffed by the National Opinion Research Center). Contact tracing processes are evolving
constantly to improve performance and stay aligned with national guidance, such as listing all
symptoms included in the recently revised COVID-19 case definition. The most comprehensive
and up-to-date information on contact tracing is available here:

 https://coronavirus.maryland.gov/pages/contact-tracing. Maryland’s contact tracing data is
updated every week on Wednesday morning.
MDH aims to initiate outreach to cases within 24 hours of the positive test result hitting the
contact tracing system. MDH is acutely aware that for contact tracing to be successful, time is of
the essence and therefore has worked diligently, as mentioned above, to reduce test turnaround
time. As always, MDH provides technical assistance to and works collaboratively with local
health department contact tracing and epidemiology staff to ensure access to raw data (when
possible) as well as data definitions, summaries, and dashboards. There are both routine (e.g., a
regularly scheduled discussion forum with MDH and local health department contact tracing
staff; regularly scheduled office hours with the information technology development team) and
on demand (e.g., training and assistance sessions scheduled on request) opportunities for local
health department staff to ask questions and receive technical assistance regarding contact
tracing. Many of the questions you raise are being worked on by both MDH staff and with our
local health department colleagues.
We cannot emphasize enough that your respective local administrations should work closely
with your local health commissioner or officer. They already have access to much of the
information you ask for in your letter.
To your specific contact tracing requests:
•

Lab Resulting Time: Local health officers already have access to this information using
the CRISP dashboards and through MDH;

•

New Cases from Quarantined Contacts: We are currently developing the processes to
capture this important outcome measure;

•

Outbreaks by Occupational Transmission by Jurisdiction: Information regarding
potential occupational exposures are dependent on voluntary responses provided during a
contact tracing interview. In addition, interviewees might indicate multiple places of
employment. As such, we cannot definitively attribute the source of infection from these
data. We continue to work with our local health department partners to refine processes
to identify and mitigate outbreaks;

•

Raw Data per Jurisdiction from covidLink: MDH routinely works with local health
departments to develop dashboards and the underlying data for the dashboards are
already available to local health department staff for easy export. Other data are more
difficult to provide, as the data structures underlying the covidLINK system continue to
evolve and there are associated challenges in providing meaningful longitudinal data.
MDH will continue to work with local health departments to ensure they have the data
they need to conduct analyses;

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 •

Data Definitions for Indicators: Local health officers already have access to the specific
questions, including how the questions and response options are defined, through their
direct access to covidLINK. We are always glad to provide assistance to our local health
department partners if they need assistance navigating covidLINK; and

•

Criteria for Symptoms used within covidLink Completed by Contact Tracers: MDH
aligns with the CDC’s case definition for COVID-19 and updates to covidLINK system
are already in progress to ensure the symptom list reflects the recently revised list of
COVID-19 symptoms.

We thank you for your feedback and suggestions for improvement and will share within MDH
for future consideration. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at
robert.neall@maryland.gov or my Director of Governmental Affairs Webster Ye at
webster.ye@maryland.gov.

Sincerely,

Robert R. Neall
Secretary
Cc: Local Health Officers

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