It was a Sisyphean endeavor. Lazarek and the other contact tracers—some 20 people initially—report to work every morning for a meeting at which the day’s cases are handed out. When Lazarek calls someone who has tested positive, he first must gently break the news that the person has Covid-19. “It’s about taking away people’s fears and informing them very clearly what they can do,” he says.
Once he’s established a rapport, he tells the patient how to quarantine. Then he begins the laborious process of making a list of everyone the infected person had face-to-face contact with for more than 15 minutes starting two days before their symptoms began.
Patients are given the opportunity to call their contacts themselves first, to give them a heads-up about what’s coming. But Lazarek and the other tracers must also get on the phone to explain that each person has to quarantine at home for two weeks. These people are instructed to track their health and note any encounters—even as fleeting as a package delivery person at the door. If they develop symptoms, they’re tested, and for those who test positive, a tracker goes back to the beginning to investigate that person’s contact chain.
In the early weeks, the cases piled up. On March 20, when Bavarian premier Markus Söder put the state into lockdown, the Würzburg area had 54 new infections. “We worked six or seven days straight, sometimes 10 to 14 hours a day,” Lazarek says. “We barely even looked at the clock. It was just important to get to the bottom of a case.”
The health authority started recruiting outsiders to double the contact-tracing team, to about 40 people, signing up students, youth welfare officers, and administrators from other agencies. They added people to manage the tide of paperwork, and they soon outgrew their clunky Excel spreadsheets, shifting instead to a more powerful database program. Counting back-office staff, contact tracers, and doctors who oversee quarantines, the team swelled to more than 100 people.
By late April, Lazarek—who had become a team leader and then a trainer—slowly began to see the effects of his work. On April 24, for the first time, there were no new virus cases to distribute at the morning meeting. By May 15, the team had released some 2,500 people from quarantine, 728 of the area’s 869 virus cases had recovered, and 59 people had died.
Würzburg is just one small cog in the German contact tracing machine. The Bavarian state government has promised 3,000 more personnel for health authorities to fight the virus, and across Germany the federal government says it’s aiming for a team of five tracers per 20,000 inhabitants—almost 21,000 people nationwide.
As Germany slowly eases restrictions on public life, the work of Lazarek and other contact tracers is far from over. The number of cases in Germany has ticked up slightly, driven by local outbreaks in meatpacking plants and nursing homes. On May 11, Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the work of health authorities, and said they remain the key to tracking and shutting down new chains of infection. “Committed people are working there,” she said. “They will manage this task, and we’ll provide the backup they need.”
--With assistance from Elise Young.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.