Meet the contact tracers on the frontline in the battle against the spread of COVID-19

No, it's not a hospital or a doctor's practise. It's an office building – and inside there is an army of contact tracers.

They are the medical detectives working to stop the spread of the coronavirus. There's no personal protective equipment, just phones and computers.

Contact tracers play a crucial role in tracking down those who have been in contact with COVID-19 positive patients and ensuring they're unable to spread the infection further throughout the community.

Many specialist teams across Australia, made up of healthcare workers and serving members of the defence force, are working to break the chains of COVID-19 transmission.

According to Dr Jeremy McAnulty, the executive director of Health Protection in New South Wales, it's a life or death kind of job.

"It's the people you don't see but are working around the clock to protect the community from COVID," he told 60 Minutes reporter Liz Hayes.

"It's piecing together information from interviews, often painstaking interviews. The job is to talk to patients who've been diagnosed with COVID to understand where they might've got it from, what their risk factors are, and who may be at risk from them of getting onward transmission."

Timmy Lockwood, a team leader with the contact tracers, says the job is 'Sherlock Holmes'-like.

"When we're interviewing cases and and finding out where people have been, it can be extremely complex," he said.

"One case can have well over a hundred contacts."

Timmy and his team have cutting edge science at their fingertips to help prevent the spread of the virus.

Genome sequencing allows scientists to identify tiny variations between different cases of the virus, pinpointing where in the world a particular infection has originated from or whether it's part of a cluster.

It's a remarkable insight into how the virus spreads but also a powerful weapon to help defeat it.

Dr Rebecca Rockett is a senior scientist with News South Wales Health Pathology leading a genome sequencing team.

"We're determining the genetic fingerprint of the Coronavirus and we can, use that fingerprint to look at how the virus is spreading in the population," she told Hayes.

"We really work in parallel with contact tracers, and what this information is being used for, is to cluster cases together, and to understand who gave the virus to who."

It's detective work on a completely molecular level, making all the difference in Australia's fight against coronavirus.

Watch 'On the Right Track' and full episodes of 60 Minutes Australia on 9Now.