Many public health departments do not have data on the type of locations where COVID-19 outbreaks have originated. Other public health departments may have the data, but they are not yet publicly reporting.
The lack of information is hampering the response to the virus. Data on which types of business (retail outlets, restaurants, manufacturing, healthcare, etc.) are more likely to experience virus outbreaks would better inform public officials, helping them to know which businesses could remain open and at what capacity, thereby lessening the economic damage.
“I think it should be a national priority and a global priority,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard University School of Public Health. “I’m supportive of going back toward lockdown, but in a second, I’d be happy to see exempted situations where we have good evidence that transmission is not a problem.”
“It would be extremely useful,” added Will Humble, the executive director for the Arizona Public Health Association and the former director at the Arizona Department of Health Services. He noted that gyms had to close down in Arizona recently, even if they had mitigation measures such as requiring face masks, temperature checks at the door, and limiting capacity. “If a gym has those in place, they still have to close, which doesn’t seem fair. Those mitigation efforts will greatly reduce the spread [in a gym].”
In late June, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, paused the operations of not only gyms but also movie theaters, water parks, and bars after reopening much of the state in May. Governors in other states, such as California, Florida, and Texas, have taken similar measures. On Friday, Hawaii Gov. David Ige, a Democrat, and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, announced measures to pause their states’ reopenings.
But many public health departments are not collecting data on the types of locations where outbreaks happen. For example, the Arizona Department of Health Services noted that it was not breaking down its data by the type of location in which the outbreak originated.
There are some exceptions. The Washington State Department of Health does break down outbreaks by the type of location in a regular report on its website. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and the Oregon Health Authority report the businesses and other locations where outbreaks have occurred, but they do not break that data down by the type of business.
The Washington Examiner categorized the business listed by Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and then compared the results to the data from the Washington State Department of Health. It suggests much about where outbreaks originate remains unknown. For example, food service companies (such as restaurants) and retail outlets each accounted for 25% of the cases traced back to a business in Los Angeles County. But in Washington, food service accounted for only 6% of the cases and retail only 9%. The biggest disparity was in healthcare facilities, which accounted for 31% of cases linked back to a business in Washington but only 2% in Los Angeles County.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health is one that collects the data but has not yet released it, according to Rikita Merai, a technical adviser at the University of California at San Francisco.
“Whenever there is a reported positive case, that case gets interviewed by a case investigation team, and it is at that point where they identify where the exposure was,” said Merai, who has been assisting the San Francisco Department of Public Health with its coronavirus response and was performing some contact tracing early in the pandemic. She stated that dealing with the pandemic was the reason why departments that have the data have not yet released it.
“From an insider’s perspective of a health department, there is a lot that they are trying to manage,” she said. “The first priority is trying to stop the spread.”
Humble claimed that many departments are overwhelmed.
“There is so much spread that it is impossible to track down who got it and where,” he said. “You can’t do the level of contact tracing that you need to do to answer those kinds of questions, because there are just too many cases you need to follow up on.”
Others attribute it to a lack of resources.
“Public health departments have been financially stressed for so long, and now, they are facing the biggest threat in perhaps that last 500 years,” Lipsitch said. “They just don’t have the people needed to do these investigations to the level one would like.”
