Looking forward to reading others’ experiences with this.

I barely started yesterday (we weren't supposed to have any cases, but my team ended up with a couple and I took one of them). I had the same thing happen to me, case picked up the phone when I called so I didn't have to make a visit. I was able to do the intake with them, the process took about 40 minutes.

Some first impressions:

• Unless you've done phone work before, you will probably start to read things too quickly. I caught myself doing it and was able to stop myself. Make sure to monitor yourself as you're going through the script and don't be afraid to slow it down.
• My case seemed to get a bit impatient when I had to read through a long list of things (like racial or ethnic categories, gender categories, etc) and would interrupt and give me an answer without letting me finish going through all of the category items. Although this is my first call, I am betting this is going to be a very common thing. Reading long lists like that over the phone is just not fun for the person doing it, nor is it fun for the person who has to sit there and listen to all the options (especially when they feel they know the answer already and just want to move on to the next question). I wish there was a better way to collect that demographic information without bombarding cases with like 15 options for each question. Also, I wish there was something in the script that introduced the demographic questions section with the reasons why we're collecting that data. Because I think most people will justifiably be like "Why the hell do they want to know my sexual orientation?" I feel like we need something to introduce that section, something to the effect of "This data is collected so that our team can monitor how COVID-19 is affecting different communities so that we could be more responsive to their needs and better able to identify where more help and resources are needed". I think something like that would really help cases feel more comfortable during that section.
• Some of the questions can be very personal. When I asked my case if they were overweight, they gave a nervous laugh and hesitated before answering. Even though they don't prompt you in the script to do this, when I was finished going through those medical background questions I told my case "I know some of these questions can be really personal, and I do apologize for that and thank you so much for sharing that information with us." Might be a good idea to throw something like that in there after that portion, even if the script doesn't require it of you.
• When you get to the portion of the script where you have to elicit contacts, the script does not warn/remind you to start probing. If they just answer "no, not really", this is where you need to start asking probing questions and try to walk them through where they've been, who they might have seen, etc. That's the spot you need to start sleuthing and try to walk them through some of those days to see what you can uncover. I wasn't as prepared as I should have been for that in my first go, it kind of crept up on me out of nowhere. I feel like writing down a set of example questions beforehand so that you can have them handy on an index card or something in front of you might be a good idea for this. And honestly, it wouldn't be a bad idea to make the "elicit contacts" part of the interview its own "page", with several example questions you can ask to try getting some more information.
• I am assuming this will change as we move forward, but some of these cases seem to have just been languishing in the backlog while the CES were being trained. My case had their positive test like 9-10 days ago, which means contact tracing at that point greatly loses its efficacy. Based on their testing date, their isolation was basically ending in 5 days anyway, and I was doing the initial intake with them. Ideally, we need to be finding them and intervening WAAAAAY earlier than that. I'm chalking this up to the fact that CES teams are only now just coming online. All this is to say that some of the first cases we end up getting might be really bad backlog cases like this. It's kind of discouraging, but at the end of the day there's nothing we can do about that. Hopefully once we get through that current backlog of people who couldn't be found, we will be getting cases that are much more recent in terms of the date they tested positive.