A million calls later, Maryland’s contact tracers stay on the job and prep for even more COVID cases to investigate

Through the ebbs and flows of the coronavirus pandemic, the phone calls have kept coming. A small army of so-called contact tracers has worked to stem transmissions by dialing Marylanders infected with COVID-19 to ask that they isolate themselves and consider who else they may have exposed so they, too, could be rung up. More than a million calls later, the massive effort was supposed to end next month with the closing of the state’s main call center, which is run by NORC, a nonprofit affiliate of the University of Chicago.