When the pandemic began, Amanda Adams of Gloucester, joined the efforts to combat the spread of COVID-19 by joining the Virginia Department of Health as a part-time contact tracer.

Adams said her mother worked in infection control for all of Adams’s life and retired in October 2019. When COVID began sweep across the country, she was inspired by her mother to help any way she could, which led her to joining the VDH in February 2020.

As a contact tracer, Adams said she would work at testing and vaccination clinics to find exactly where people had contracted the virus. She said she was sometimes the only person a quarantined individual had to talk to. She recalled a single mother whose children exposed her more than once and was often stuck at home with only her children.

Adams knows firsthand what it’s like to be a parent whose child was exposed to COVID. One of her daughters caught the virus after there was an outbreak at camp. Thankfully she said her daughter was asymptomatic...