How picking apart a person’s life can save that of another – Guide
The walls of our school career teacher’s office were covered in faded yellow and orange posters with endless job suggestions for students who liked science or math, or English or history. I don’t remember contact tracking being on any of these lists. I think I could create a career poster for a contact tracker; it’s not science or English you need, it’s curiosity, empathy and a good knowledge of Melbourne’s suburbs. Contact tracking was the best and worst job I’ve ever had. Jokingly, I tell my friends that I was born to get in touch with trace and they smile. I suspect my curiosity has been irritating at times in the past. But I know how to ask a question and keep asking until you get an answer. I can convince people to tell me where they’ve been, who they’ve met when they shouldn’t, who they’re sleeping with, who their dealer is. I can handle the silence and the tears. My own tears are never far away in this job. The need to be cruel shocked me. I still feel the weight of the sadness of the recently widowed grandmother who I separated from her family due to exposure to COVID. That meant she spent the first night without her husband, alone. I locked up families with young children in tiny apartments for weeks. I called many companies to tell them that their venue is an exhibition and that they should be closed, knowing that the call could close them forever. I made 12th grade students skip exams. I’ve sent people to hotel quarantine, appreciating the bravery of those who fight separation. The information I discovered resulted in the closure of a local fish and chips store, large apartment complexes, shopping malls, and the closure of a regional town. My naivete and privilege sometimes surprised me. Despite a long career in nursing, I find the reality of some people’s existence horrible. Families that already face poverty, addiction, domestic violence, unemployment and chronic illnesses now have to face COVID as well. I remember a woman who needed us to help her bring down an AVO against her husband. He had COVID and she knew he had nowhere else to go. The international student who took COVID just doing his job, but then lost it. The single mother who had no one to take care of her children when she was admitted to COVID. The families we arrested who told us they had no food or diapers at home. Many times I have heard a colleague order and pay for food from a needy family himself. But you don’t hear about it at press conferences. Isolation does strange things to people. We often need to call our cases multiple times to verify a detail or request a reminder. Sometimes it feels like people are waiting for the phone; you can hear your loneliness drip with every word of our conversation. Some grow up attached to a specific contact tracker and just want to talk to them. Others avoid our calls or can’t get out of the phone fast enough. Many get angry. Contact tracking is all about details. Contact tracking is all about speed. Sometimes we do one well and not the other. Contact tracking keeps me awake at night, every night. Contact tracking is part of all my waking hours. I’m at work or at home thinking about work, or attending press conferences about work, or talking to friends and acquaintances who want to praise or complain about my work. Or often both. It’s hard not to feel responsible for the high numbers of COVID in Melbourne right now. I think about what I might have missed or what outbreak I could have avoided. But I know having this job is a privilege. every time i choose up The phone and start a contact tracking interview, I’m surprised and grateful for people’s willingness to open up and share your every move, to let me separate every bit of your own life, in order to maybe save someone else’s.
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