Public health professionals, who might not have experience with contact tracing, can take this course to learn the basics and to be successful in reaching out to community members to save lives.

The course can complement existing disease surveillance systems, programs, and trainings your organization is already using to help monitor the public's health. It also provides an interactive learning experience through interview skill-building videos, quizzes, and an exercise to practice key decision-making during a contact interview.


In this introductory course, students will learn about the science of SARS-CoV-2 , including the infectious period, the clinical presentation of COVID-19, and the evidence for how SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted from person-to-person and why contact tracing can be such an effective public health intervention. Students will learn about how contact tracing is done, including how to build rapport with cases, identify their contacts, and support both cases and their contacts to stop transmission in their communities. The course will also cover several important ethical considerations around contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine. Finally, the course will identify some of the most common barriers to contact tracing efforts -- along with strategies to overcome them.