When the coronavirus reached Lubbock in the middle of March last year, the city’s public health director Katherine Wells and her team started a spreadsheet.
“A spreadsheet that was literally, like, a basic line listing,” she recalled. “Name, age, date of birth.”
Contact tracers added notes in one box. Had the person traveled? How long were they instructed to quarantine?
“That spreadsheet just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Wells said.