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First, the good news: Thom Kuhn quickly recovered from a bout with COVID-19.

The Wildwood resident is president of a construction company. He shared his news with me so I could shed some light on the process of contact tracing, eight or so months into the coronavirus pandemic.

There is further good news: Kuhn and his family took quarantining and contact tracing very seriously.

His story starts Sept. 4, when he started experiencing various cold symptoms. By Sept. 9, still feeling symptoms, he decided to get tested at a local urgent care. The medical professionals there told him it seemed unlikely, based on symptoms and history, that Kuhn was infected with COVID-19, so, unlike me when I got my first test for the virus (it was negative), he wasn’t particularly anxious waiting on the results. Kuhn found out two days later that he had tested positive.

“My case was mild and luckily no one in my household or with whom I had contact got sick,� Kuhn says. “We handled all of the contact tracing and mandatory distancing on our own.�

Kuhn quarantined himself in the basement until Sept. 27. His family got tested and also quarantined in the house. He called people he had been in contact with during and before the time he had symptoms. Two days before he ended his self-quarantine, Kuhn received a letter from the St. Louis County Department of Public Health. It was titled: “Notification of Positive Test Result for COVID-19 and Release from Isolation.� It was the first contact Kuhn had from the county.

Right at the beginning, the letter explains what is obvious by the time it took Kuhn to receive it:

“Due to the large number of people who are contracting COVID-19 at the present time, there have been significant delays in both DPH receiving test results from laboratories and our ability to contact cases in a timely matter.�

The letter wishes Kuhn well and tells him that he was officially free of isolation Sept. 19. It suggests he should contact anybody he came in contact with up to 16 days prior to his symptoms, which by the time he received the letter would have been more than a month earlier.

“St. Louis County is seen as having pretty tough COVID-19 regulations for Missouri,� Kuhn notes. “Its follow-up and monitoring, based on my experience, is just awful. How many people with ongoing symptoms have gotten a letter like this and just headed back out into public? Tracing a month later would seem a fool’s errand. We’ve been at this for 8 months.�

The county is aware it has contact tracing issues. “In March, we instituted an order that any entity that does COVID-19 testing must report positive cases to us within six hours of getting the result. Even so, DPH still receives notifications that are too late to effectively contact trace,� said St. Louis public health acting co-director Spring Schmidt, in an emailed statement. “Our goal is always to make contact with everyone who tests positive within the first 48 hours. … We deeply regret that this process doesn’t work well for everyone. It is neither malicious nor negligent.�

Late last week, the office of St. Louis County Executive Sam Page announced a new partnership with St. Louis University to increase its contact tracing efforts. Unlike many states, Missouri, consistently in a national pandemic “red zone,� has not established its own, statewide contact tracing effort, which became more acute late last month when Gov. Mike Parson and his wife, Teresa, came down with COVID-19. Like Kuhn, they have recovered.

Meanwhile, at the national level, where the efforts coordinated by the White House have been a disaster ever since President Donald Trump called the coronavirus pandemic a “hoax,� Republicans in Congress are blocking new efforts to help states, counties and cities get the public health funding they need. Now Trump, his wife, Melania, and at least one top aide, , and the national contact tracing around potential super-spreader events connected to the president is in high gear.

In some cases, unfortunately, residents of St. Louis County who come down with the virus appear to be on their own for a month or so, if Kuhn’s experience is any guide.

Kuhn hopes his story is a cautionary tale several months into a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans and shows no end in sight.

“My experience was easy,� Kuhn says. “I have a family that puts up with me and we’re well off enough that we can take care of each other. For those not as lucky, we need to do a better job of helping out. That’s why the county letter just struck me as completely tone deaf. … We should be past the point of putting out incomplete information. Those who should know better have to do better than that. Otherwise, those who don’t know better won’t do what they need to do. … In the immortal words of the late, great Elijah Cummings: ‘. As a country we are so much better than this.’�