How we track and trace COVID-19

For many months, New South Wales has been scaling up our ability to track COVID-19 cases and trace the people they have been in contact with across the State, to interrupt further community transmission.

Understandably there has been some interest around how this process works.

The contact tracing process begins with one of our local public health units calling a person with a positive COVID-19 test to tell them their result.

First, we need to check whether they’re safe and clinically stable, or if they need medical care. We’ll inform the patient of what having a positive test for COVID-19 means. We also explain what it means to stay in isolation at home, and why they need to do this.

We then ask the people with a positive result to answer a list of detailed questions about who and where they might have exposed while they were infectious.

To do this we step through the patient’s recent movements during their infectious period – every day and every hour.

We use lots of strategies which might help jog their memory. This often includes photos, phone calendars, appointments and receipts.

After conducting the immediate detective work, the wider team is alerted to the new case at one of our daily briefings. The next step is to take the case through an extensive interview as to where they might have acquired the virus. This includes identifying whether the case has been in contact with another previously reported case or attended any high-risk venues in the 14 days before their onset of symptoms.

Based in head office, the Operations team then puts the pieces of the puzzle together to form a view of the jigsaw of transmission across the State.

Our Operations staff analyse information from the various public health units to look for connections between cases, and assign new cases to known clusters.

Simultaneously, our Contact Tracing team is busy hitting the phones. In March we started with 4-6 contact tracers – today we have more than 300.

We work through venue sign-in lists, COVID-safe app data and more, to identify and call people who may have been in contact with a confirmed case of COVID-19.

We usually consider someone to be a close contact if they’ve spent 15 minutes or more with someone with COVID-19 face-to-face, or they’ve been in the same space (such as at a restaurant, gym, shop or classroom) for one to two hours or more (depending on the risk assessment for that space). Most other contacts will be treated as a casual contact however sometimes we will revise these categories if we notice a higher than expected level of transmission in a particular place.

The people of NSW have been incredibly supportive of this work, but we need your help to continue.

Never go to work or school while sick. Instead, please come forward immediately for COVID-19 testing no matter how mild your symptoms. If you have any COVID like symptoms, please assume it is COVID until you have a test to prove otherwise. If you receive a negative result and develop symptoms again, you should get re-tested.

For more information on COVID-19 and to find your nearest testing clinic, visit www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19.