NEW YORK – New York’s plan for taming the coronavirus hinges on taking a time-tested practice to an extraordinary level: hiring an “army” of people to try to trace everyone who might be infected.
In the coming weeks, the state and city plan to build up a massive system to interview thousands of newly diagnosed people and track the places they visited and people they met.
It's part of a common approach to controlling infectious diseases -- testing, tracing contacts and isolating those infected.
But the scope is staggering even for a public health system that used the technique to combat AIDS and tuberculosis. “The scale is just unprecedented,” says Denis Nash, a City University of New York epidemiology professor who formerly worked at the