School nurses answer the call, volunteering on the front lines as coronavirus cases surge

Marie Noonan is on the hunt.

She is a disease detective these days, conducting phone interviews with coronavirus patients to trace where they have traveled and who they have seen, starting three days before they felt sick.

The objective? Document the chains of infection and figure out where COVID-19 will strike next. “Find out who’s been exposed and did not know about it,” Noonan said. The data informs the state’s communicable disease registry, allowing public health officials to track the pandemic.

Noonan, normally a nurse at Elizabeth’s Nicholas Murray Butler School, is volunteering in the fight…