WORCESTER, Mass. - Students at Assumption University are training as contact tracers to help respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Twenty students are taking the Infectious and Epidemic Disease course, where they will learn the  basic biology of COVID-19, while completing trainings to become a Massachusetts contact tracer. The training involves interacting with people who have been exposed, collecting their close contacts and then contacting those people. 

"They kind of track down who can possibly be infected and not even know it. I think a big part of this pandemic is unknowingly spreading it and contact tracers do their part to kind of combat that in the best way they can," said Senior, Temi Falayi.

Professor Aisling Dugan, Ph.D. says the University has teamed up with the City of Worcester, and hopes to have students take this training and use it help the community. 

"These students will be learning from the text book and history as well as taking this training course and what we hope is this serves as a pipeline to get a lot of summer internships if they're still needed so our students can go seamlessly into the summer and do contact tracing for the city of Worcester," said Professor Dugan.

The students began their first training offered by Johns Hopkins University last week, and will then take the Massachusetts training program.