Contact tracing: How disease detectives are closing in on COVID-19 in Australia

A cruise ship docks and passengers spill out into a city. A celebrity couple is mobbed by fans and dignitaries eager to shake their hands. Well-to-do socialites arrive at a birthday party fresh from a ski trip in Aspen. A man steps off a plane and kisses his wife.

Smith also worked on the world's last pandemic, the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, and last year helped the World Health Organisation trace a disastrous measles outbreak in Tonga to a rugby team newly returned from New Zealand. But "there's never been anything like [COVID-19] in public health" in his lifetime.

The average case will involve about nine or 10 close contacts, mostly spread across their home or their workplace, says infectious disease experts Professor Raina MacIntyre. That's fewer than a more infectious disease such as measles, which spreads further through the air. Smith says departments can call in police under biosecurity laws if they have to but, right now, this is mostly being done to keep people with confirmed or suspected cases in quarantine. "It takes time to do all that, we need to get people to tell us things right away so we can get on top of it," he says. "So we take privacy really seriously, we keep it close to the chest.

to measure how people are following new social distancing measures. NSW says it hasn't requested data from telcos to track individual's movements and has ruled out using it to enforce home quarantines but is now exploring the use of a range of technologies, such as those used in Singapore, to enhance contact tracing.Van Diemen says Victoria is also "exploring" its technological options.

There are a lot of unknowns about the pandemic, van Diemen says, but analysis of the infection data shows COVID-19, mercifully, still follows a certain logic. “The stuff that makes you raise your eyebrows and say, ‘That doesn’t really make sense’ will often, in a day or two or a week, make sense because [a confirmed case] was actually exposed somewhere else [or] by another known case,” she says. “We do get those 'a-ha, mystery solved' moments.

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