Forgotten community:
To one man, error was an example of county’s lack of communication and outreach about spread
Website listed 10 cases. It was wrong.
For a while, North Fair Oaks looked like a COVID-19 miracle.
The small, unincorporated community in San Mateo County had all the makings of a hot spot, with a largely Latino population, many of whom were essential workers in crowded housing, similar to hardhit East Palo Alto nearby.
Yet for months, public data from San Mateo County put North Fair Oaks’ case number at 10.
Everardo Rodriguez wasn’t convinced.
“Anecdotally, I had heard of more cases happening in the community, so I just knew that the county’s number wasn’t correct,” said Rodriguez, a librarian at Stanford University and chair of the mostly advisory North Fair Oaks Community Council. In October, he and a few other residents started asking questions.
The next month, the health department quietly made a correction: Instead of 10 cases, North Fair Oaks had 551. By late January, the neighborhood had 1,485 cases — a rate of 102 cases per 1,000 residents, making the area one of the hardest hit in San Mateo County. The corrected error is now a small but telling reminder of how Latino communities crushed by COVID-19 did not always get the information they needed.
“I was very surprised,” Rodriguez said. “Surprised in the sense that there was so much data that had not been updated — not necessarily surprised in terms of the county not keeping a … good update on the cases here in North Fair Oaks.”
North Fair Oaks, he said, is an often forgotten community. Nestled between much larger Redwood City on one side and much wealthier Menlo Park and Atherton on the other, the community of 14,500 is nicknamed Little Mexico, with a population that’s three-quarters Latino. On Middlefield Road, the main drag, a store selling cowboy boots offers Spanish-language tax preparation services near a convenience store prominently displaying the day’s exchange rates from dollars to Mexican pesos and Guatemalan Quetzals.
Until November, almost all coronavirus cases in North Fair Oaks had been incorrectly attributed on the county’s public dashboard to Redwood City and Menlo Park, both of which share ZIP codes with the community. County officials couldn’t explain why 10 cases were correctly assigned to North Fair Oaks from the start.
But Srija Srinivasan, deputy chief of San Mateo County Health, said health officials were aware of the real North Fair Oaks case numbers all along, thanks to geocoding tools that map
coronavirus cases to a specific town or even block. Because the incorrect number was only on public-facing maps, Srinivasan said, the error had minimal impact on the health department’s analysis or decision making.
However, she conceded that the county’s public data on hard-hit communities has prompted action from local groups and allowed the health department to build stronger partnerships.
For most of 2020, local groups did not have the benefit of accurate public information about North Fair Oaks.
Warren Slocum, the San Mateo County supervisor whose district includes North Fair Oaks, also said he doubted the failure to provide accurate case data had any real-world implications.
“The question is how many people are actually
looking at that and paying attention,” Slocum said. “Well, some are, but I don’t know that people in North Fair Oaks are looking.”
Rodriguez was. To him, the error was only the most visceral example of the county’s lack of communication and outreach about the spread of the virus in Latino communities. The failure, he said, makes it difficult to warn residents about the risk they’re in or
to advocate for more resources in hard-hit communities.
“If you see a community only has 10 cases, obviously that doesn’t become a concern in the eyes of anyone, including the residents of that community,” he said. “When you don’t see the number of cases, there’s really not much of a case that one can make to request resources or to request services, testing, et cetera.”
This month, the one that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, Americans celebrate women’s history. The theme in 2021 — “Valiant Women Refusing to be Silenced” — is a continuation of last year’s COVID-postponed centennial celebrations of the 1920 ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment. Throughout the month we can expect talking heads to ask their guests, as they did about Black heroes last month, what woman has influenced their lives. (No fair naming mothers, whose moment comes in May on Mother’s Day Sunday.)
Promoted by Maryland’s own Rep. Barbara Mikulski, Women’s History Month was officially designated as such by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Ever since, it has brought welcomed attention to both women’s issues and the often forgotten women who fought for equality and refused to be silenced. Still, if you need a promotional month, you aren’t equal.
There awaits in Congress an opportunity to truly celebrate a major step on the long and tortuous path to women’s equality by certifying the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Like the suffrage amendment, the ERA was buried in congressional committees for years after its first presentation to Congress in 1921. Written by the indomitable suffragist-turned-equal-rights advocate Alice Paul, its main article reads “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
In 1972, after a burst of interest in civil rights and the work of many valiant women refusing to be silenced, the ERA received the necessary two-thirds vote in Congress. Campaigning then began for the required approval of 38 (three-quarters) of the states. Thirty states had ratified within two years and another five by the deadline imposed by Congress of seven years. And then the movement stalled, three states short of the requirement.
Right-wing forces led by Phyllis Schlafly, along with economic interests such as insurance companies, had initiated an antiERA campaign based on contradictory lines of thinking.
The first claimed that the ERA would lead to unisex bathrooms, require women to serve in combat, eliminate protections for women in the workplace and at home, and lead to more abortions. In effect, it would overturn American civilization.
The second set of arguments claimed that the ERA was not needed because women were already protected by the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment and Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act (women were famously included in the latter piece of legislation in an unsuccessful effort to torpedo the act overall). Over 20 states, including Maryland, already have equal rights provisions in their state constitutions, this thinking goes. So why clutter up the U.S. Constitution with an unneeded amendment?
For various reasons these supposed protections have had only a limited effect on the stubborn discriminations against women, however. A case in point: As late
as last year Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library was paying lower wages for similar work to female library supervisors than a male supervisor. The ERA would provide tangible changes in the relationship of women to the law. Presently sex is not subject to judicial strict scrutiny nor is it an inherently suspect legal category like race or ethnicity. The ERA would create a proper federal foundation to end various forms of discrimination. Additionally, it would serve as a powerful symbol of our national commitment to sex equality.
There is now an opportunity to certify the ERA. Thirty-eight states have now approved the amendment; the last, Virginia, did so in January 2020. But the amendment still faces two hurdles.
One, Congress had established deadlines for the ratification of the ERA that have expired, and much of the opposition to the ERA focuses on procedural grounds. As several senators, including Maryland’s Ben Cardin, have pointed out, what Congress has established, it can remove.
Secondly, four state legislatures have rescinded their vote for the ERA, a clearly unconstitutional effort that would open the serious amendment process to continual partisan pandering. By a simple majority, Congress can support the Cardin-MurkowskiSpeier resolution rescinding the time deadlines and certifying the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, “I would like my granddaughters when they pick up the U.S. Constitution to see that … women and men are persons of equal stature. I’d like them to see that that is a basic principle of our society.”