Bay Area allowing construction projects to resume a gamble

Let’s be clear. The decision this week by Bay Area county health officials to allow construction projects to resume is a major gamble with the lives of thousands of workers and their families, neighbors and acquaintances.

The stakes are enormous. It’s imperative that construction companies and their workers strictly adhere to the protocols established in the new orders and do everything possible to maximize distancing and sanitizing.

The ability of other companies to reopen in the future and our confidence in our public health officers’ decisions will hinge on the outcome of this experiment. If it fails, if it triggers new waves of coronavirus cases, we could be back to square one.

To measure whether the experiment is working, public health officials must establish a transparent data collection process that allows everyone to know whether or not resuming construction activity is producing new coronavirus cases and subjecting the region to a new wave of infections.

The county health officials’ continued lack of transparency in reporting nursing home cases and deaths creates cause for concern as to whether they will be forthcoming on the effects of this week’s major decision.

This experiment is probably premature. We still lack enough testing and contact tracing capacity for this first step in reopening the region’s economy.

The lack of testing remains a national disgrace. The Trump administration’s abdication of its responsibility to craft and execute a national testing strategy has left states to go it alone.

Governors don’t have the power possessed by the federal government to force private industry to cooperate and ramp up production. The result has been a shortage of tests and testing supplies, forcing states to compete against each other in the global marketplace.

At the same time, Bay Area public health officers have been under intense pressure from businesses, unions and some government officials to resume construction and reopen the region’s economy. On Wednesday, the public health officers caved.

Now they must ensure the conditions of their new orders are strictly enforced. This is no time for construction companies and workers to take a “wink-wink” approach to safety protocols.

Yet construction contractors already are complaining that the rules are too restrictive. “We have serious concerns and oppositions related to aspects of the new order,” Emily Cohen, executive vice president of United Contractors, told the news magazine Engineering News-Record. “We believe many of the new requirements are arbitrary, unworkable and a step backward for heavy civil engineering construction.”

The contractors say there aren’t enough trained administrators available to verify protocol compliance. If true, public health officers must ensure that no project moves forward without a trained safety officer in place. The state should also take steps to ramp up training of safety administrators.

The Bay Area’s public health officers have built a well- deserved reputation for modeling public safety since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were the first in the country to announce sheltering-inplace orders that by all indications “flattened the curve” and likely saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

Now, they are staking that reputation on the construction industry’s ability to meet the new protocols and keep the lives of workers and those they come in contact with safe. Like it or not, the pandemic is far from being over. We are nowhere near herd immunity, and the virus continues to spread through the Bay Area and beyond.

Let’s hope we don’t regret this gamble.