We should all remember Stanislaus COVID victims are real people, not just numbers
It’s easy, when taking stock of the coronavirus pandemic, to get lost in numbers. We must never forget that behind each statistic is someone’s parent, neighbor or loved one. A real person.
Way back on April 27, Stanislaus County reported our sixth and seventh deaths with this brief description: “An adult female and an adult male, both with underlying medical conditions.” Vague though it was, the description helped us in a small way see them as actual people with compromised health who fought and lost, without compromising privacy.
Media received from government a few reports in subsequent days with similar scant descriptors. But suddenly, even those briefest of details disappeared, and the county since has issued only raw death counts in daily updates.
Three dead one day, for example, five the next, and so on. No gender. No age, not even a range. Just a number reflecting how many died.
County leaders have struggled with their messaging partly because they sometimes lose sight of the human element.
In the board’s latest meeting, Supervisor Terry Withrow minimized our 95 deaths (to that point Tuesday morning; it climbed to 104 by Thursday) by noting that they represent only 0.017% of Stanislaus’ population — once again choosing to frame his argument in numbers.
Focusing on numbers is a classic way to take the emphasis off real people and their lives, whether intended or not.
I’ve known Withrow many years. He is an accountant with a big heart. But he will continue to struggle with his messaging if he keeps insisting on talking about numbers instead of people.
The county upped its game by having public health educators Bobby Mosher and Kamlesh Kaur deliver video briefings on Monday and Thursday, bringing fresh faces to the county’s outreach. Both extended condolences to those who have lost loved ones. People commenting on the Facebook page immediately noticed the change in tone, and praised the combination of “compassion and useful information.”
COVID victims are real people
Here’s an idea that could help the county appear even less institutional and more sensitive: Bring back the simple, humanizing information in daily reports of our dead.
Divulging age and gender — and even town of residence, I would argue — does not reveal a victim’s identity and is not an invasion of privacy. It’s not a violation of HIPAA laws that govern confidentiality.
Other less-fussy agencies have discovered this.
Just to our south, Merced County produces daily updates with COVID victims’ gender, age range and whether they had underlying conditions — exactly as Stanislaus used to. Because Merced leaders are committed to transparency and not secrecy, people there found out on Wednesday, for instance, that they had lost two women and four men, five of whom were 65 or older and the other somewhere from 35 to 49. Five also had preexisting conditions, and the other they’re not sure.
Stanislaus public health officers easily could do the same. We’re not sure why they once did, then decided to become unreasonably overprotective, because they did not respond when I asked.
The silence is not unusual. The Washington, D.C.-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says journalists all over the United States have run into similar brick walls.
“Agencies that simply invoke HIPAA like it’s some shield or magic wand, as if that excuses the agency from its disclosure obligations, are harming the public’s right to know,” Gunita Singh, an attorney with the organization, told me in a phone interview. Information that doesn’t identify individual patients is “squarely within the public interest,” she said.
“The public and the news media have a right to view this data, to analyze trends and to understand risks they’re facing to best protect themselves,” Singh continued. “Denying access doesn’t serve any public purpose and HIPAA shouldn’t be used to withhold it.”
Seeing trees, not just forest
We appreciate that the Stanislaus COVID dashboard has seen many improvements since the onset of the pandemic. County officials deserve credit for sharing many helpful data sets, including cases in each ZIP code. Breakdowns by ethnicity and age range for cumulative positive cases and deaths would be useful, if the county would update them; some appeared not to have changed in weeks until Friday.
But those descriptors apply to total cases and total deaths. For example, we can tell that 43% of all victims killed by COVID were Latino, and 45% were white. That’s helpful if you only want to see things in terms of a crowd. It’s not if you want to see individual faces.
Newspapers wrestle to gauge readers’ appetite for depressing news. COVID fatigue can be exhausting. But it’s our duty to bring you useful information, and occasionally to put a human face on suffering caused by a supremely contagious disease that has put so many out of work, kept children away from school and profoundly affected lives in other ways.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, The New York Times produced short biographical sketches of victims with photographs and called the series Portraits of Grief. Readers loved it because it provided tangible, real-world proof that these were real people with real faces and real lives whose hopes and dreams had been silenced and lost. And it gave us a way to connect with them as people and not just numbers.
The Times in March began a similar project called Those We’ve Lost and explained the purpose: “To convey the human toll of Covid-19 by putting faces and names to the growing numbers of the dead, and to portray them in all of their variety.”
In the Modesto region, readers have come to know some local victims and survivors through our pages. We mourned with the family of Pedro Zuniga, for example, who was only 52 and prevented from holding his family’s hands in his final moments. We rejoiced with Turlock’s Nader Ammari, 56, who clung to life for two weeks on a ventilator before recovering, albeit with organ damage.
Helping The Bee tell coronavirus stories
That we might all better appreciate the human toll, Bee editors have put out a new call for loved ones of COVID victims to help us share their stories. Embedded in some of our online coverage is a short-form survey asking for shareable details; one prompt, for example, reads, “Tell us about your loved one. Who were they? What will they be remembered for?” People can voluntarily fill out the form online, or email answers to tips@modbee.com.
I should make absolutely clear that I’m not calling for government officials to provide humanizing details in death toll reports so that our reporters have a better chance at tracking down survivors. Knowing about age, gender, hometown and compromised health won’t get us any further along that road. Victims’ profiles you’ve seen in our pages came about because loved ones came to us, or shared openly in social media.
We take seriously our role in helping everyone understand and navigate this crisis. Numbers are essential in this effort, but we must never let them push real people out of the picture.
This story was originally published August 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
