SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- While the curve may be flattening, efforts are ramping up to do contact tracing. Bay Area health departments are hiring teams of people to find out who has the coronavirus and then trying to find everyone they came in contact with.

Alex Coburn, a medical student at UCSF, was grounded by the stay at home order just like everybody else. Now, he and some of his fellow medical students have been recruited to work alongside the San Francisco Public Health Department.

"We have about 30 medical students who have signed up to be contact tracers," Coburn said. "And we are starting to make calls this week."

"Hopefully we can do a small part to help slow down the spread of the virus but also but also get our country, our city opened back up for business as soon as we can."

In contact tracing, someone working on behalf of a health department asks questions of a person who tests positive for the coronavirus. Then the health department contacts all the people the COVID-19-positive person has been in contact with, questions those people and asks them to monitor their symptoms and quarantine if needed.

"Think of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon," said Daniel Peddycord, Contra Costa County's Public Health Director. "The people you are coming into contact with are coming into contact with new people, are coming into contact with new people. Etcetera, etcetera."

Peddycord said moving forward, we will still be required to do some level of social distancing. Contact tracing, he says, will not defeat the virus by itself.

"It's like trying to hunt a really aggressive beast here with just one arrow in your quiver," he said. "I mean you want to have more tools to chase down this beast of a virus in a way that effectively wrestles it to the ground."

In a daily briefing Monday, Sonoma County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said a combination of social distancing and contact tracing are adding up to success.

"I'm really feeling optimistic about the success our county has had in stopping the spread of COVID-19," she said. "We are finding our new cases primarily through contact tracing.. We're not seeing that many cases popping up in the community with no reason why they would have COVID. So that's also very optimistic."

Apple and Google have announced they are teaming up to develop technology that will enable cell phones to remember electronically who their owners have been in contact with. Some privacy advocates are pushing for restrictions so those companies and the governments they are working with do not abuse the access to millions of cell phones.

"People need to think of this crisis, not as an isolated incident, but as only one world-altering event that will be happening this year," said Matthew Guariglia with the Electronic Fronteir Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on digital rights.

"With the global economy in turmoil and a presidential election, it's important for people to consider how surveillance--given or taken in the context of a public health crisis--could be used to chill protest, free speech, or public expression further down the line," he said.

"If medical experts, rather than law enforcement, verify that a certain type of collected information is helpful to curbing the spread of the virus--we need to build safeguards that that information will be collected only on an "opt-in" basis, only the bare necessity of information will be stored, it will not disproportionately impact vulnerable communities, the data will be stored securely and deleted promptly, and that the program will end as soon as it is no longer needed."