For Trish Mannes, telling people that they have coronavirus brings out the best in humanity. “Most people are worried about others,” is her conclusion after years of experience as an expert contact tracer attempting to halt the outbreak of infectious diseases of all kinds.

Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor  www.thetimes.co.uk 

Since February, that has meant coronavirus, when Ms Mannes was leading efforts to slow the first cases of the outbreak around Brighton and elsewhere in southeast England. “They would all say ‘oh but my daughter’s about to sit GCSEs, what does that mean for her?’ or ‘oh my goodness I visited my elderly mother last week’. It’s always worries for others. It’s incredible — people talk a lot about a fairly self-centred selfish society, I don’t actually think that’s the case.

“In our experiences, people would say, ‘absolutely, we’ll do as you ask because this is about protecting the community’.”

The principles of contact tracing, in essence, have remained unchanged for centuries. Find a case. Quarantine them. Work out who they have been in contact with. Quarantine them, too.

Having controversially abandoned mass contact tracing in the early stages of outbreak, Britain is about to return to it on a mass scale. Hopes of loosening social distancing depend on training up an army of tracers to stay on top of every case, using skills learned by experts such as Ms Mannes.

While she says that “a good chunk of this is very, very formulaic”, one of the key skills is the crucial first interview with each case, where tracers must make sure that they have found out everything they can about a person’s movements.

“They key things are interpersonal skills and your ability to empathise with people and to understand where they’re coming from,” she said. “The other trick is about investigation and to be really thorough, and ensure that you ask all the right questions and remain curious about what you might be missing.”

In the early days of the outbreak she recalls that as well as fear, “people felt very guilty about who they may have infected . . . there was an enormous sense of, ‘oh gosh, have I just brought this horrible disease in to the UK? Is this my fault?’ We had to do a lot of reassurance around ‘this is a disease, you are a person who contracedt it, it is not your fault’.”

Since then, as contact tracing as continued in efforts to halt outbreaks in care homes, things have got easier in some ways. “It’s a different request than it was in February. No one’s got social events that they’re cancelling,” she said.

As Britain returns to mass contact tracing it will be “a lot more automated”, with mass texts sent out to groups of contacts. People will still be needed to do phone contacts but Ms Mannes says “that’s reasonably simple conversation and someone can be trained to do that . . . If that conversation becomes more difficult there’ll be a higher tier, where people have more skills more training, and then they’ll eventually get to the experts.”

In many ways, though, she expects the job to get easier: “No one has to be convinced to take coronavirus seriously, and it is no longer so hard to persuade people to stay at home.”