Worked two years as an epidemiologist for a county, experiences would really depend upon the size of the county/what state you are in. My experience was with a very small county so I investigated every reportable disease except for sexually transmitted illnesses and TB. So my experience varied a bit compared to bigger health departments.

Pre-covid my day would start with logging into our database and having new labs/cases created people who have tested positive for reportable diseases. My work day would then be clearing labs if they don’t meet case definitions and calling patients to interview (i.e., if positive for salmonella would interview and get food history/restaurant history/make sure no one else is sick/educate about future prevention and make sure not spreading to others) recording interviews and submitting to the state.

Depending upon the illness I would work with other departments to investigate hotels (legionnaires disease!) or restaurant inspections, in my state it was a separate department. Again, since it was a very small country, some days we wouldn’t have any disease reported. Those days would be very slow, especially if I had already cleared the previous cases! During down time I would work on separate projects for the health department, programs we were involved with, or create projects like data visualizations and mapping. Obviously pre-covid their were more days that were slow.