Now based in Canberra with ACT Health, Ms Hundy is an epidemiologist who maps the spread of diseases to stop them in their tracks.

Her work means she's often the first person to notify someone they've tested positive for COVID-19, which she said could come as a shock.

Her next step is figuring out where and from whom the person contracted the virus.

"It can take a couple of hours to do a really good interview," Ms Hundy said.

"They sometimes have to go away and look at their records, their calendar, phone, just to work out what they've done."

It's a process which requires retracing a person's movements in as fine a detail as possible, including anyone they have interacted with.

"We go back 14 days and look at where they've been in the 14 days before they got sick to find out where they got the disease from," Ms Hundy said.

She said it was relatively simple to trace someone who had only been in an office with their regular colleagues.

The tracing becomes more complicated as soon as someone leaves their house or visits the supermarket where they don't know who they've walked past.

"You need to then know if there's other cases linked or if they've got it somewhere. Or if we don't know where they've got it from," Ms Hundy said.

From here she and the other COVID-19 tracers work out who the person might have given the virus to.

"The other important step is finding out who they might have given the disease to so we can put those people into quarantine," Ms Hundy said.

"You're wanting to find out who they had contact with from the 48 hours before they got sick until they got put into isolation."

Close contacts of a case are considered most at-risk.

"They have to have had more than 15 minutes face-to-face contact with them," Ms Hundy said.

Ms Hundy said it had been her interest in forensic medicine which inspired her to pursue a science degree at Charles Sturt University when she graduated from Wagga's Lake Albert Public School in the NSW Riverina.

She then won a scholarship with ANU where she did a Masters in Applied Epidemiology in Adelaide.

Her father, Paul Hundy was for more than two decades a high school science teacher in Wagga.

"So maybe that's where my interest came from," she said.

Ms Hundy said "lots of people are predicting lots of different things" about the remainder of the pandemic.

"My feeling is we will see more cases ... But we're all very well prepared to respond," she said.