A lot of my family members and friends have been affected by this terrible disease and

I really wanted to help out in some major way.

That's Lisa Abramson, a contact tracer in New York City.

She's one of the disease detectives now charged with tracking down anyone who may have interacted

with a person infected with the coronavirus.

To help stop the spread, Abramson reaches out by phone to people who have recently been

diagnosed with COVID-19.

You ask some of the questions, have you contacted anyone or have you had sex with anyone?

We also ask them to, if you can pull out your cell phone and look at your calendar to

see where you were around that time so that we can get the accurate information.

Contact tracers in the United States rely on people trusting them enough to give honest

information to those kinds of questions.

So it can be a very difficult job.

There's no one federal agency overseeing the contact tracing efforts.

So exactly how it works varies from the state to the local level.

And even though contact tracing has been used to contain a variety of diseases over the

decades, from smallpox to HIV, it's never been done in the United States at the scale

now required to tackle COVID-19.

So are we up to the task?

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent.

And this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

Syra Madad is the Senior Director of the Special Pathogens Program Office at New York City

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