The city has hired 4,000 contact tracers since last spring, and they’re a key component of the city’s strategy to battle the coronavirus. Their job is to reach people who test positive, make sure they isolate, find out other secondary contacts they might have infected, and get those people to quarantine. In November, we asked one contact tracer to record an audio diary of a day on the job. She discussed her work anonymously, because speaking to the media could jeopardize her employment. Below is an edited transcript of her remarks.

I got hired in June and did a lot of online training and then went out into the field, one time in July, and then more in August, and a lot in September, and now I have a lot of cases. I visit people at their home after they have either tested positive for COVID or had contact with someone who tested positive.

Before I go in, I have to prepare all the things to bring. I use hand sanitizer, I put on gloves, I put on a face mask, and then I have to bring a letter that is addressed to the person and it asks them to give us a call, but I only leave the letter if I can confirm this is their address. I have a whole extra bag of masks which I give to people. No one answers the door wearing a mask. Rarely do they say, “Hold on,” and get a mask. Usually I give them a mask.

I’m a Level 2 tracer. There are people who call the cases and contacts and say, ‘Hi, are you okay?,’ but if they can't reach them three times, then it gets kicked up to Level 2, and we go out into the field and try to track them down at their home. I wanted to do this kind of community engagement, in-person interaction, when I applied for the job. I wanted to do this work because I'm interested in pursuing a career in public health.

Contact tracing isn’t that different from what I thought it would be, but parts of it are surprising.

Listen to Fred Mogul's report on what a contract tracer does on WNYC:

I was continually surprised and frustrated over and over again for the entire summer into September [as the program was getting off the ground]. Doing an intake or a monitoring call through Salesforce doesn't match up with the reality of doing the work on the ground, and it takes a long time to get changes implemented.

For instance, only in the past week or so have we been able to give people the option to not be contacted seven days a week. What would happen is that if they miss a contact from a tracer over the phone, then someone would go in person to visit them. Especially with the Orthodox Jewish community, we saw that really backfiring. It didn't really make sense, because they're still there. They're just missing a day for religious observance.

So, hopefully, now the system will work.

Almost no one knows where they've gotten it and whether they might have transmitted it, and I almost never have people give contacts to me -- but maybe they give them more to other people. My experience doesn't match the percentage that Health and Hospitals puts out.

[Editor’s note: According to the latest figures, tracers reach 90% of people who test positive, complete intakes with 75% of them, and get secondary contacts from 45% of them.]

It's hard to say, because I have such a small sample size, but today I had five cases, and maybe I completed intake with two of them. It honestly blurs together so much. I feel almost like Groundhog Day.

I just got off the phone with one case. He's supposed to be quarantining. And he was very upset when I told him that, even though he also said he spoke to us yesterday. He said, ‘You call every day.’ He was confused, and he didn't know if he had COVID or not. And I told him he was only exposed, and then he really wanted to know who exposed him, and he was frustrated that I couldn't tell him, so I explained a little bit about patient confidentiality.

And then he said he goes to work at certain hours, so can we call him at other hours? And I said, ‘No, sir, I'm sorry to tell you, you can't go to work right now.’ He was very frustrated by that, so I gave him a phone number for the New York State Paid Family Leave program, which we give to people, but I don't know what happens when we give them that number.

Another person I talked to yesterday runs a small business from her house -- personal care, beauty stuff, nails and hair, things like that. And she said, “Is anyone going to come by, because I have clients coming, so is anyone going to come by to check on me?” I told her, “No, we're not going to come by unless you don't answer the phone, if we try to reach you, and we don't hear from you a couple of times, then someone comes by. Otherwise no one's coming by. It's on the honor system, and it’s just about trying to keep yourself and others safe and containing the spread.” But she was upset about not being able to work.

It's hard to tell who's going to listen. You really can't make any kind of estimation about that just based on the one interaction with them.

It can be hard to tell how effective this system is. Many people, if I actually get through the script with them, they sometimes act really chill, when it comes to the part about quarantining for ten days or however long. And they say, “Okay,” and I’m, like, ‘Well, is it really OK? Or are you just saying that, because you want to get off the phone with me?’

It's very hard when you go around and people aren't wearing masks. Like right now, I'm sitting in my car, working, and there are two guys hanging out on the street. They're six feet apart, but they're not wearing masks, and they've been talking together for probably 20 minutes, and it can feel like, ‘Why are we doing this?’

Sometimes it just makes me feel crazy, like I've hallucinated the whole thing.

[Editor’s Note: Dr. Ted Long, the director of the city’s Test and Trace Corps, said that because Tracey is a Level 2 contact tracer, the people she is trying to track down, by definition, are the most difficult to reach, and that accounts for the relatively low response rate she experiences. Long also has an explanation for why Tracey receives few contact names from people who test positive: He said that when surveyed, they report having had no interactions in the previous two weeks and are not withholding information from tracers.]