Here’s what Shah had to say.
“Contact tracing varies greatly based on the type of disease and the type of outbreak you are contending with.” In a particularly memorable example, Shah continues to explain, “I first learned how to do this in 2001 when I was working in Southeast Asia, in connection with a type of particularly virulent dengue hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Northern Cambodia, when we had to go about contact tracing in that fashion to try and find the pool of mosquitoes that carried it were breeding in.”
My response is a single word was “wow,” which he appropriately used as an opportunity to shift the conversation back to the coronavirus.
“In this current situation, the purpose of the contact tracing is twofold. The first is upstream, which has to try to get a sense of where the person who’s infected with COVID-19 may have acquired it from … The other reason we do contact in this situation is downstream, which is to say who do they live with or who do they interact with who they might transmit the virus to … We generate a list of all of those close contacts, and inform them they have been in close contact with someone who is now positive, and they need to watch out for symptoms for 14 days.”
https://bangordailynews.com/2020/05/04/opinion/contact-tracing-101-a-conversation-with-nirav-shah/