Contact tracing is pretty much what you’d expect from the name: It means tracking down all the people that an infected person came into contact with when they may have been contagious. For a disease like COVID-19 that can be spread before a person is showing symptoms, you’d probably also want to track down all the people those initial contacts came into contact with, as well.

It can be a massive undertaking! When we’re not engaged in social distancing, we come into contact with tons of people every day–often without even knowing who they are (think: people standing in line with you at Starbucks).

Initial Response: Find an example of contact tracing being used to control an outbreak other than COVID-19. 

• Briefly describe the context (e.g., the disease, the location, the population at risk).
• How and why contact tracing was used?
• What technologies did the health authorities employ (e.g., pen and paper, tablets, cell phone location data) and how was it used?
• What challenges would you foresee in applying the same approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how could those challenges be addressed?.