COVID contact tracing: Pandemic's silent soldiers

"Will Santa Claus know where to find us now that we moved?"

The question was asked by a 6-year-old boy to his mother as they were being transferred from her car, where they had been living, to a domestic violence shelter in Commack on Christmas Eve.

The prospects seemed bleak. The mom was ill, the weather was cold, the small family was in hiding from an abusive ex-husband and father, and there was neither money nor time to cobble together even a makeshift Christmas.

But somehow, Santa Claus found them. Thanks to the combined efforts of Alisha Maura, a COVID-19 case investigator, and Allison Alper, a community support specialist, the family was given a proper place to sleep, and Christmas came to a little boy who had no idea how close it had come to being taken away.

When Maura called the boy's mom, all she knew was that the woman had tested positive for COVID. In the course of their conversation, Maura learned the rest of their heartbreaking story.

So Maura, who works for New York State's COVID contact tracing project, alerted the Community Support team. And Alper, to whom many of the most difficult and heart-wrenching cases seem to be funneled, tapped into her network of charitable organizations trying to save a little boy’s Christmas.

Within an hour, the family had been relocated to the safety of a shelter and Alper was arranging for the purchase of presents when she learned that Branches Long Island, a charitable organization in Middle Island, had already distributed its cache of Christmas toys to some 200 needy families.

"I called the mom and said, 'Santa Claus needs to know what your son really, really wants,' " Alper said. "Turns out he wanted Candy Land and some DC Comics characters. There was no way I was letting that kid miss Christmas."

For nearly the past two years, this is the kind of work done by the contact tracing project, formed in May 2020 to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Its primary purpose was to identify and inform those infected with COVID, and the people they had come into contact with, of the need to isolate or quarantine to protect their families and friends, as well as the community at large.

For the record, "contact tracers" call people who have come into close contact with someone known to have been infected; "case investigators" call those already infected. "Community support specialists" work with food pantries and other charitable organizations to help Long Island's neediest individuals.

But all share the same basic job description: part investigator, part data collector, part shoulder to cry on. "A lot of these people are sick and scared," Maura said, "and they just need someone to talk to."

And sometimes, they need more than that.

Although many have considered calls from a contact tracer or case investigator annoying or intrusive, many others have found them helpful, reassuring and even therapeutic. In some cases, they may have been lifesaving. "The calls where people thank you and tell you how appreciative they are make it all worthwhile," Maura said.

People from all walks of life make up the project, from former health care professionals to lawyers to college students, retirees and stay-at-home parents. Maura was compelled to join after witnessing the suffering of COVID patients when she worked in the ER at Long Island Community Hospital in Brookhaven. Alper was a social worker at a center for young adults with autism. Michelle Bono, Maura's supervisor, was a nurse who wanted so badly to be part of the COVID solution she was willing to do the job for free. Thankfully, she didn't have to.

Individuals like that abound in the project, and all seem to have two things in common: selflessness and a desire to help others through perhaps the most trying time in our lives since World War II.

Having been a journalist for the previous 35 years of my adult life, 16 of which were spent writing about sports for this newspaper, I believed my interviewing skills would be a good fit for the job. After all, I had been talking to people who did not particularly want to talk to me for decades.

But I found that to be a good contact tracer entailed being more than an effective interrogator. The job turned out to require a combination of problem-solving skills I had never needed in talking to professional boxers or baseball players.

In the course of one day, I might speak to a single mom who due to quarantine requirements was in dire need of diapers and baby food for her small children, a working professional who insisted on going back to work, and a lonely retiree who requested a daily check-in call, just for company. It would be my job, and later when I became a supervisor, that of my crew, to find a satisfactory solution for each of those situations.

Most of the time, we did. But occasionally I or one of my colleagues would be subjected to verbal abuse of the most vile and obscene sort. One 22-year-old tracer was shaken so badly by an earful of vicious racial slurs and threats she needed to take the rest of the day off. She was hardly alone. Tainted by politics and inflamed by certain segments of the media, some were unreceptive and even hostile to our calls.

Over the past 20 months, my crew and I have been praised and vilified, conversed with and hung up on, called angels by some and Nazis by others. We have had callers tell us COVID was a hoax or a government plot to wipe out certain segments of the population. We have been told Dr. Anthony Fauci is a communist and Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul fascists. We have been subjected to lectures on the benefits of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and the tyranny of mask mandates. We have been called propagandists and shills for Big Pharma.

Through it all, we have done our best to listen, empathize, counsel and de-escalate when necessary. We have never lost sight of our goal, which was to educate people, allay their fears, and help a jittery public navigate its way through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

Along the way, we learned a lot more about the fears, politics and prejudices of our friends and neighbors than any of us would have wanted to know. But what we came to understand was this: When people are united by a common fear, they tend to find common ground. That is why the good calls, the productive conversations, the interactions that resulted in both sides feeling as if something positive had been accomplished, seemed to far outnumber the bad.

Now that the project appears to be winding down, there is a bittersweet feeling among those of us who have been here virtually from the beginning. Of course, our endgame always was to get the pandemic under control and work ourselves out of a job.

But at the same time, we knew there were aspects of it — the camaraderie among remote co-workers who have never actually met, the shared experience of doing something positive for our community, the sense of satisfaction one gets from having helped a sick and frightened stranger — that would likely never be replicated again in any of our lives.

"This is the best and most rewarding job I've ever had," Alper said.

Having covered a dozen Super Bowls, a half-dozen World Series, four Olympic Games, a bunch of Kentucky Derby races, and countless championship boxing matches, allow me to add:

I totally agree.

This guest essay reflects the views of Wallace Matthews, a case investigation supervisor for the New York State contact tracing initiative.