THE MERCURY NEWS: Santa Clara County said it needed 700 contact tracers. It has hired 50

SAN JOSE — Santa Clara County has struggled to find staff to build out a 1,000-person workforce to perform contact tracing, a key indicator for reopening more parts of the economy.

By this point, the county had aimed to have about 700 tracers in place to track down the close contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19. But three weeks after the county executive voiced that goal, the health department has just 50 contact tracers, amounting to about 2.6 tracers per 100,000 residents, with the capability to go through about 25 cases a day.