
It's the phone call no one wants to receive right now. "Hello, I'm calling from the Department of Health. You recently underwent a test for COVID-19..."
But these contact tracing calls, and the people making them, are among Australia's most effective weapons when in comes to combating the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Dr Ben Scalley is the head of the COVID-19 contact tracing team at WA Health. He walked Mamamia through exactly what's involved in this life-saving, frontline work.
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Who are contact tracers?
Government contact tracing teams existed well before the COVID-19 pandemic. As now, their role has been to squash outbreaks of diseases that make their way into Australia, like measles, for example.
They do this by notifying positive cases of the disease and working quickly to identify who that person has been in close contact with so they too can be isolated and/or treated.
But as cases of COVID-19 began to swell in China at the beginning of the year, state governments began to prepare their contact tracing teams to operate on a far larger scale than ever before.
Western Australia's team, for example, swelled from the existing group of "a couple of doctors and around 10 nurses" to roughly 150 as the state battled its COVID-19 case peak in March and April.
Should more be required, Dr Scalley said, personnel will be recruited from more diverse professional backgrounds in health, such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists and even retired health workers.
In New South Wales, the team is currently around 300 strong, while in Victoria, where cases have surged by thousands in recent weeks, it's reportedly closer to 2000.
What happens when a contract tracer calls?
The first task of a contact tracer is to deliver the unfortunate news to the person who has tested positive.
"A lot of people that we call have some concern about their own health, but also they're extremely worried, often, about family and friends they've been in contact with. They start thinking about their elderly mother or grandparents," Dr Scalley said.