Stanislaus leaders must be fully transparent with coronavirus reports by ZIP code

The weekend outbreak of COVID-19 cases in a Turlock nursing home underscores a need for Stanislaus County leaders to provide a more complete local picture of the coronavirus pandemic.

People initially didn’t learn about the alarming escalation of positive virus tests at Turlock Nursing and Rehabilitation Center — 94 residents and staff, as of Tuesday, with five deaths, and 132 test results still pending — from county officials. People found out Saturday because journalists were doing their job, paying attention to state reports on nursing homes and following up on information posted by the Turlock facility on its own previously obscure website.

Shouldn’t a big part of the job of county public health officials be to inform the public about health risks?

A pandemic by definition is a threat that concerns every single person, in this case because the virus is supremely contagious. Public health officials should share any and all information that might help us avoid the contagion and not hide behind an unreasonable interpretation of privacy rules.

This includes being open about clusters of COVID-19 cases. Such information might help parents decide whether to take their children to a playground in Neighborhood A, for example, rather than Neighborhood B. It also would help us understand the role that poverty plays in the spread of disease in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and how to help them.

We aren’t given that ground-level information by our Stanislaus leaders, who prefer providing a higher-level view.

Stanislaus County upgrades dashboard

Previously, Stanislaus public health provided COVID-19 numbers in each of the county’s nine cities and in the broad unincorporated area. The county’s new coronavirus dashboard, unveiled Monday, takes a good step in the right direction and further breaks the unincorporated area into five geographic districts corresponding with boundaries represented by each of the five county supervisors.

The website also offers an upgraded look to show our hospitals’ ICU counts and available beds and ventilators. People now get a better sense for how we’re preparing for a surge, and how COVID-19 might be affecting their general area.

County leaders should take it a step further.

Our people would be better served by breaking down data in each ZIP code. That would provide us with 28 reports throughout Stanislaus County, as opposed to the current 14.

Modesto residents should see cases by ZIP code

Modesto alone has 10 ZIP codes. We should know how many cases are in each; a single report for a city of 215,000 does not give us much to go on. We have no way of judging for ourselves whether there are clusters.

It’s not a novel idea or practice. Hundreds of municipalities across the United States are reporting COVID-19 numbers by ZIP code. Several in California are forthcoming with these details, including Sacramento and Alameda counties, whose officials provide helpful, interactive maps with much more detail than we get.

It’s clear that reporting at the ZIP code level can be done, and is being done. It should be done here.

Reporting by ZIP code would greatly increase clarity, for example, in Salida — the county’s largest unincorporated community, and host of the county’s new drive-up testing clinic. With 14,658 people, Salida actually is larger than three of our cities: Waterford (population 8,823), Hughson (7,370) and Newman (11,119). ZIP code-level reporting would do the trick, as Salida has only one ZIP code.

It’s curious that Stanislaus public health has reported exact ages of people who died of West Nile virus, which you can’t get from another person, yet gives us only broad age ranges for people infected or killed by COVID-19, which you can. Don’t tell us that pinpointing a victim’s age is an invasion of privacy for a highly contagious virus but somehow not for a noncontagious one.

Trust is strengthened when public servants abandon the default position of hiding information, or giving only a partial view. Taxpayers deserve full transparency and a full accounting of what this pandemic is doing to our neighborhoods and our people. “Trust us” doesn’t cut it.

This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 7:51 AM.