Students snuff out new chains

Frankfurt am Main – A team of medical students pressed into service by Cologne’s public health office are scrambling to cut off potential new chains of coronavirus infections by endlessly repeating the same questions.

“What are your symptoms? Who have you met in the past few days?” they ask people with confirmed or suspected cases.

Such painstaking detective work is vital to avoid a second wave with more deaths and economic damage, as Germany eases the far-reaching lockdowns imposed in March to control the disease’s spread.

From yesterday, the human virus trackers are backed up by an official contact tracing app, aping other nations’ efforts to automate identification of potentially infectious encounters.

For now, a fax dropping out of the machine in the Cologne office announcing another positive coronavirus test marks the start line for the team. With not a minute to lose, the health office aims to call the new case within an hour.

Their task on that first call starts with warning the person they are sick and should quarantine themselves, says Andreas Gehlhar, one of the 200 students manning the phones since March.

For worse-afflicted neighbours Germany has been an example, with fewer deaths, at about 8 800, than other European countries like France, Italy or Britain.

From the initial case, the students spread their net to all of the people they might have come into contact with in the 48 hours before the positive test.

Like detectives, the tracers often can’t settle for the first answer they get. “An old person living in shared housing might tell us she’s only seen her daughter in the past two days and, later, you find out she spoke to the cleaning staff in the stairwell, or sat for 30 minutes in the waiting room at the doctor’s office where she was tested,” said Barbara Gruene, a student doctor.

Once the most extensive possible list of contacts for each case has been established, they must then call each person in turn. Between them, the students can check up on the contactees in more than 20 languages, vital among Cologne’s multiethnic population. The tracers aim to convince all first-degree contacts to self-quarantine.