"It's very shocking for a lot of people to get a phone call to say they have Covid-19. We give them a few hours to think about who they have seen, but it can be overwhelming," says Kim Sayers, a contact tracer with the HSE.
She is among a team of 280 contact tracers making 800 tracing calls every day in centres across Galway, Limerick, Dublin and Cork.
The HSE is currently actively recruiting 550 dedicated contact-tracers. "A call-one is when someone is getting a positive diagnosis.
These calls are usually carried out by clinicians," says Paul Gillen, who was the shift leader at the HSE's national tracing team this week, currently located on the campus of the NUI in Galway. "A call-two is when we phone those people back to get their close