But the Senior Local Land Services Officer is just weeks into his first time ever contact tracing a virus in people.

"Emergency management in one of our roles in Local Land Services," he said.

"I had done some tracing. A couple of years ago I went up to North Queensland to help with the Panama banana disease and I did some tracing, which was mainly about whose machinery had been borrowed from a banana plantation to a sugar cane farm and that sort of thing. When I saw the option to help out, I thought it's good experience, because we are trained in doing emergency management it would be good to get some experience."

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The Gunnedah-based Local Land Services (LLS) officer is one of 14 staff in the area, and 81 across the state recently seconded into a new job: running down the state's latest COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr Truman volunteered for the job and contact-traced his first five close contacts in early September.

LLS Emergency Management Coordinator Megan Davies said the NSW Health work isn't so different from contact-tracing salmonella in eggs.

"[They're] pretty similar actually. The fundamental concepts are the same," she said.

"You need to find the initial source of the infection and then you need to trace forwards, so you need to see where the infection has spread to, and then you need to trace backwards. That principle is consistent across diseases of all different types, human, animal, plant."

Dr Davies, herself a contact tracer, said the work is vitally important for crushing virus, but can put them in quite confronting situations.

Most contacts have already received a text message telling them they're a close contact by the time a tracer rings them. But occasionally they're forced to tell people they may have been exposed to a deadly virus. Dr Davies once called a kindergarten teacher at school, while she was teaching a classroom of students, a "very distressing situation", she said.

"It's really satisfying, it's a hard day's work but at the end of the day you really feel like you've made a difference," she said.

"Even five phone calls, one of those phone calls could be a person who was potentially going to spread it to hundreds of people.

"I feel like that's something we'll be able to tell our grandkids about. When they ask about the great pandemic, we'll be able to say this is what I did, this is the part I played."

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