The Woman in the Black Coat

TED-Style Talks

In this talk, I would like to explore our challenges with rapidly gaining the trust of an initially mistrustful community in a time-sensitive outbreak situation, and the difficulty in contact tracing when the contacts don’t want to be found.

In October 2024, an Iowa man died of Lassa fever acquired during travel to West Africa. During his illness he had contact with >150 healthcare workers, who were quickly notified of their exposures and given isolation instructions, but he also had contact with family and community members in his small Iowa town.

The close-knit and grieving community was reluctant to disclose the identities of the exposed family members, and while we tried to be empathetic, we were desperate to find and quarantine all contacts before they potentially became sick and exposed others.

The incubation period of Lassa fever ranges from 6-21 days, and against this deadline we raced, down a path that felt less like public health and more like espionage, making use of surveillance footage from 2 hospitals, 3 blurry license plate photos, hundreds of pictures across 8 social media pages, and 1 stakeout in a rental car on a cold, gray residential street.

Gradually, family members were found and contacted, and one by one the nameless people seen on hospital security footage were identified, until eventually only one question remained: who was the woman in the black coat?

Abstract Category: TED-Style Talks