Experts track who’s been exposed to virus

With each new case of coronavirus, medical professionals turn detectives, tracking one of the most elusive viruses they’ve ever encountered.

It’s a race against the clock on an international scale, a seemingly impossible task of determining how each and every person fell ill. Where have they traveled? How long have they been sick? What have they touched and whom have they approached?

Only with those answers can the puzzle of coronavirus be solved and its spread stopped. On Tuesday,

the hunt led from New York to South Florida.

In an early morning radio interview in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said a middle-aged lawyer from New York was confirmed to be the second person in the state to contract the coronavirus.

According to Cuomo, an initial review of the man’s travels did not suggest he’d been to any of the countries associated with large numbers of confirmed cases of coronavirus. It did reveal he had recently been in Miami.

However, Cuomo cautioned that so far it does not seem as though the man had contracted the disease when he was in South Florida. “We don’t see any direct connection on the initial review,” Cuomo said in his interview. A spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Health declined to comment on the man’s connection to South Florida.

Also on Tuesday, Florida confirmed its third case of the coronavirus — a 22-year-old woman in Hillsborough Country.

Like every other case, a patient’s story begins as a mystery.

Figuring out who is infected by a virus always has been difficult, according to William Darrow, who did it during the HIV and AIDS crisis of the 1980s while working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even so, Darrow said, the coronavirus is a different monster.

“This virus is much easier to transmit,” said Darrow, a professor of public health at Florida International University.

Tracing the coronavirus poses unprecedented investigative challenges: It is burdensome to figure out who is infected because it can take two weeks before symptoms appear, Darrow said. And then these sleuths must account for who that infected person might have put at risk by touching others, sharing an object or simply being within 6 feet of them.

“Think about it,” Darrow said. “How many people are you within 6 feet of on a daily basis?”

In addition to reaching out to family members and friends of the two patients, medical investigators must be going through their ridesharing receipts to find the names of drivers; identifying flights they recently took and who else was on them; and jogging the patients’ memories for every detail about their previous two weeks that they can remember.

The official name for this type of work is “contact tracing,” and Darrow said it is usually led by a state or local health department, with the help of the CDC. In Florida, the agency that leads this work is the Florida Department of Health.

Darrow said the process generally begins with interviewing patients to find out details about where they have traveled, who they have seen, where they have eaten or where they have slept.

In the case of the coronavirus, he said, the net would be cast even wider to pin down specific objects and surfaces infected people may have touched, as well as anyone they may have sneezed, coughed on or stood near.

Investigators have to hope the infected patient is healthy and stable enough to recall as much information as possible, Darrow said. During Darrow’s time interviewing HIV and AIDs patients, this was often difficult because many patients were already severely ill by the time they arrived in the hospital.

Fortunately, many people infected with coronavirus can still speak and convey information when they get to the hospital, Darrow said.

That’s about where the good things end with the coronavirus.

“It’s very, very complicated,” Darrow said.

Once investigators have gathered enough information from a patient to identify someone else who may have contracted the infection, Darrow said they get in touch with that person and get them tested as soon as possible.

In the case of the coronavirus, medical officials likely would take the step of asking people to self-quarantine themselves as they wait for more information on their diagnosis. “You don’t have contact with people until you get a clear bill of health,” Darrow said.

If people were to test positive for the coronavirus, they would be hospitalized for at least two weeks until they can be tested again, he said.

TED S. WARREN/AP A worker wears a mask at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, near Seattle, on Monday.