There’s been quite a bit of talk about contact tracing and how important it will be, to keep the tide of new coronaviruses cases low, particularly now that we are reopening our states, at a rapid pace. Johns Hopkins is offering a free on-line course teaching people the skills needed to be a contact tracer and the link for that course can be found right here:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/covid-19-contact-tracing?edocomorp=covid-19-contact-tracing
I read that many states will be hiring thousands of contact tracers and therefore, many people are taking the course. Even people not particularly interested in actually becoming contact tracers are taking the course in order to learn how the contact tracing will work and how it will help slow down coronavirus infections in our communities. The course takes about 5-6 hours to complete.
Contact tracing uses a variety of people skills and sleuthing abilities to get in contact with as many people as an infected person may have passed the virus to, in order to convince these people who were possibly infected with the coronavirus, to get tested and to also, self-quarantine. Apparently the job takes a fair amount of people skills to wade through a sick person’s mistrust and fear and need for privacy, in order to be able to help the person currently infected, and all of those others who might have come in contact with the infected person. Since a lot of the work is done by telephone, and many people typically don’t answer unsolicited phone calls, the work can be very frustrating. Still, if you are a people person, and inclined to do sometimes tedious detective work, it would probably be quite fulfilling to do a job that quite literally, helps to save lives.
