The name is confusing: the health department still has a so-called Contact Tracing Team (CTT). Contrary to what the name suggests, however, the employees there no longer track the contacts of people with Covid 19. In the meantime, the main focus is on recording and reporting positive test results. The team is still fairly well equipped, with up to 362 full-time positions recently. From January this will be drastically reduced to 35 positions. The city council made the decision on Wednesday. The reduced team should initially be in action until the end of March.
Health officer Beatrix Zurek (SPD) had proposed a reduction to 135 jobs. However, that was still far too much for the green-red coalition. With 35 jobs, the remaining tasks could be implemented well, said Clara Nitsche (Greens). Klaus Peter Rupp (SPD) also said that was enough.
Sharp objection came from Stefan Jagel (left), who was “stunned”. Above all, he criticized the way the employees were treated, who found out shortly before Christmas that they were no longer needed. In addition, there are still many tasks in the corona detection. Hans Theiss (CSU) agreed with the assessment. In view of the waves in the past two winters, it makes sense to spend two million euros on a precautionary measure and leave 135 jobs. Jörg Hoffmann (FDP) spoke out completely against maintaining the CTT.
Why is it still needed? With the abolition of the obligation to isolate, the health department argues, many tasks are eliminated. However, the main statutory task of reporting positive test results will remain. The amount of work required to look after the clinics and old people’s and nursing facilities will also remain.
With 35 jobs, it will no longer be possible to report the corona numbers to the day, warned the deputy health officer Susanne Herrmann. Finally, Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) calculated that with the current number of cases, an employee would have to process around eight to nine reports per day in the future. “I think that’s reasonable.”
And the people who are now without a job for a short time? Personnel officer Andreas Mickisch (SPD) assured that everyone who is interested would be offered a perspective for continued employment with the city – for example in the social department for processing housing benefit applications or in traffic monitoring in the KVR.