Dallas Paiva was excited and nervous as she picked up the phone and made her first call as a Massachusetts contact tracer.
The goal of the state’s Contact Tracing Collaborative is to reach out to every person who tested positive for the novel coronavirus or might have been exposed and help them isolate themselves so the virus can’t spread. Paiva had spent more than two weeks in training to become part of this team, which has grown to comprise more than 1,500 people.
“I was really excited to actually start doing it, and the person answered the phone and they were just not happy that I called them. They were actually very angry,” she recalled. “They said, ‘You folks have been calling me and calling me and I'm done with my isolation period. My doctor’s already cleared me. Can you stop calling?’ ”
After apologizing, Paiva recorded this information in the person’s file and flagged it for a supervisor.
Paiva has fielded hard calls before. She usually works as a member services representative for Blue Cross Blue Shield, but the health insurance company has temporarily redeployed her to support the state’s contact tracing initiative. Paiva first spoke with WGBH News during her training.
In the three weeks since placing that first phone call, Paiva, who is 24 and from New Bedford, has had two job titles. For the first week and half, she was a follow-up associate.
Her job was to check in on everyone who tested positive or was exposed throughout their quarantine period — often calling daily. She’d make sure they were following the rules and didn’t need any assistance.
Paiva remembers speaking with one woman who had received a positive coronavirus test. She learned that just four days earlier, the woman’s husband had died from the virus.
“She was becoming extremely emotional,” Paiva said.
Paiva called her day after day as the woman mourned, sitting alone in quarantine and wondering what was in store for her.
“Regardless of the script and what information we need to collect, we also need to show these people that we're going be there for them and support them through this,” she said.
In the end, the woman was asymptomatic and appreciative of the follow-up calls, Paiva said. And Paiva found that there was something rewarding about helping people during their hardest moments.
But, she said, she felt she wasn’t helping enough. There weren’t enough cases assigned to her and she had a lot of downtime between follow-up calls.
So, she requested a new role. Now, she’s on the team that takes incoming calls, and she never knows what she’s going to get: someone who has missed a call from a contact tracer and is calling back, a health clinic that is following up on a positive case or, perhaps, someone who needs permission to end their quarantine.
One of the toughest calls Paiva received came from a woman who had just received a positive coronavirus test and lives in a household with nine other people.
“A lot of those people were children,” Paiva said. “There was a lot of uncertainty and fear that they couldn't self-isolate in that house because of the amount of people living there, and they needed housing assistance.”
Paiva connected the woman with a resource coordinator who could guide the family to the right state and local services.
Even though Paiva works Monday through Friday, she said, she often finds herself worrying over the weekend about the people she’s spoken to during the week. So, every Friday, she checks through her notes to make sure everybody is taken care of, and to see if there’s a supervisor following up.
Despite the worrying, she said, it’s nice to be a part of the solution to this pandemic. But the work is far from done.
“I think this is exactly the moment that is important for the contact tracing endeavor,” said John Welch of Partners In Health, the global health care nonprofit organization that is helping the state and local boards of health run the contact tracing initiative.
As Massachusetts relaxes regulations and people begin to go out more, Welch said the number of close contacts they have will go up.
This could mean that the task of tracking down all contacts will become harder. Even as the state’s numbers trend downward, Welch said he remains “cautious” and won’t declare success until the pandemic is officially over.
And though Paiva finds work as a contact tracer fulfilling, she said, she’s looking forward to the day when she goes back to being a member services representative for Blue Cross Blue Shield.
She misses her daily routine — even her commute.
“I miss traveling an hour and a half to get to my job and I miss it taking two hours to get home. And I miss my colleagues at the office and waving ‘Hi’ to people walking by the cubes,” she said.
What Paiva really misses, she said, is a sense of normalcy.
