Shepparton has its own COVID-19 contact tracing team

Established two weeks ago, the team is based at Goulburn Valley Health and is made up of about 25 doctors, nurses, allied health and administration staff.

The team operates from 8 am to 8 pm each day to track, trace and monitor active COVID-19 cases across the region via phone, in collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services.

The team's catchment area is vast — it monitors from Kimore to north-east Victoria, across to Cobram and throughout the Goulburn Valley, and also works closely with Albury Wodonga Health.

“Our primary task is making contact with people who have tested positive to COVID-19, establish infectious periods, identify their movements and close contacts and provide them with information about self-isolating,” said Hume operations lead Julyan Howard.

“The team also escalates when people’s condition worsens and continues to support cases and contacts until they are no longer considered infectious or at risk of developing COVID-19.

“We all play an integral role in the work that is required to establish where someone has contracted COVID-19 from, in an effort to stop the spread as quickly as possible.”

Goulburn Valley Health chief executive Matt Sharp said the process could be time-consuming, especially if a person who had tested positive for COVID-19 had a number of close contacts.

“It depends on the size of the families and what people might have been doing in the days before they became positive with COVID-19 — that really determines how many phone calls that the team has to make,” Mr Sharp said.

“In some cases, it can be maybe three or four people.

“But in some cases, (such as) the two outbreaks of we're managing at the moment, it can be up to 25, 30, or more people that the team is tracing at any one time.”

It's not just identifying close contacts; the team ensures people diagnosed with COVID-19 are isolating properly, and makes phone contact with all active cases at least daily to monitor their health.

“(The team checks) how are they going, what sort of supports they might have at home, what type of accommodation needs they may have, because what we're really focused on is limiting the spread of COVID-19, so the accommodation side of things is a really important part,” Mr Sharp said.

“(And) our specialist staff, who typically would work in chronic disease management or nursing and allied health, will be contacting those people at least once a day.”

Mr Sharp said the team's knowledge of and connection with local organisations had made a difference, as it has across regional Victoria where other localised contact tracing teams have been established.

“What we're finding in particular ... is that a great benefit to us is using the local relationships that we already have in place with different service providers,” Mr Sharp said.

“Our contact tracing team has done a terrific job to work through that quite quickly and very methodically, to get that understanding of where they've contracted COVID-19 and how it's been passed on to other close contacts.”

Mr Sharp said Victoria Police was available to the team if there were compliance issues.

GV Health medical services executive director and chief medical officer John Elcock said the "focus" of the contact tracing team was about limiting the spread of COVID-19 in the community.