Hailey Puckett called six people every day for two weeks.
She would read off a script, making sure to ask each of the women she called daily a series of questions and if they were experiencing specific symptoms.
“How are you feeling today? Are you experiencing coughing? Have you experienced fever, chills or body aches?” she’d ask.
But Puckett, a graduate student in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s masters in public health program, also answered other questions and provided a friendly voice to these people, who were officially quarantined by the Hamilton County Health Department for 14 days after they had been exposed to a known case of COVID-19.
Through contact tracing and monitoring, the health department and volunteers tracked down these individuals, each of whom had come into contact with a person who was diagnosed with COVID-19, and monitored whether they became ill.