In the battle for control of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), we have few weapons. Yet contact tracing is among the most powerful. Contact tracing is the process by which public-health officials identify people, or contacts, who have been exposed to a person infected with a pathogen or another hazard. For all its power, though, contact tracing yields a variable level of success. One reason is that contact tracing’s ability to break the chain of transmission is only as effective as the proportion of contacts who are actually traced. In part, this proportion turns on the quality of the information that infected people provide, which makes human memory a crucial part of the efficacy of contact tracing. Yet the fallibilities of memory, and the challenges associated with gathering reliable information from memory, have been grossly underestimated by those charged with gathering it. We review the research on witnesses and investigative interviewing, identifying interrelated challenges that parallel those in contact tracing, as well as approaches for addressing those challenges.

在控制冠状病毒19号（COVID-19）的战斗中，我们几乎没有武器。但是，联系人跟踪是最强大的。接触者追踪是公共卫生官员识别暴露于感染病原体或其他危害的人的人或联系人的过程。但是，尽其所能，联系跟踪会产生不同程度的成功。原因之一是，联系人跟踪打破传输链的能力仅与实际跟踪的联系人的比例一样有效。在一定程度上，这一比例提高了感染者提供的信息的质量，这使人的记忆成为联系追踪功效的关键部分。然而，记忆的脆弱性以及与从记忆中收集可靠信息相关的挑战，被那些负责收集它的人严重低估了。我们回顾了关于证人和调查性访谈的研究，确定了与联系追踪中的挑战平行的相互关联的挑战，以及应对这些挑战的方法。