End secrecy over workplace COVID counts

Throughout the pandemic, workers, especially essential workers, have struggled to get information about coronavirus outbreaks at their job sites. They have had no way of knowing whether they were putting their health, and that of their families, at risk by trying to earn a paycheck.

Now that employees in more sectors of the economy are returning to their offices and businesses can reopen without mask restrictions for vaccinated people, the magnitude of the problem is magnified.

All workers deserve to know whether the potentially deadly virus is prevalent at their job sites. All consumers at, for example, restaurants, grocery stores or bowling alleys should be able to ascertain whether there has been a recent outbreak at businesses they might patronize.

About half the state’s population has been fully vaccinated. But even those who have been inoculated do not have absolute protection. Moreover, children under age 12 still cannot get any vaccine, and a significant subset of others cannot because of preexisting medical conditions.

And there remains a not-insignificant segment of the population that continues to put their and others’ lives at risk by refusing to get vaccinated. This all at a time when a new, more contagious variant is infecting portions of our nation.

For all those reasons, it’s time for state and county health officers to end the unconscionable secrecy over workplace COVID-19 information.

Fortunately, some of California’s 58 counties recognize the importance of providing basic information to help people make educated decisions about whether their workplaces and grocery stores are safe.

In response to records requests from Bay Area News Group reporter Fiona Kelliher, about a third of the counties have recently provided lists of companies with outbreaks, the number of cases and the dates.

That’s how we know of, for example, about 171 cases reported at the Richmond HelloFresh last July, 187 cases at a newly opened Amazon facility in the Riverside County city of Beaumont in January, and 50 cases at an air conditioning company in Vacaville. And that the number of cases in Amazon facilities exceeds 1,700 in just five counties: Riverside, Solano, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Kern.

This is information workers should have been able to access when they were reporting to work. Not weeks and months later. In many cases, it turns out that employers had kept the information from their employees.

Contra Costa and San Mateo County turned over records to Kelliher. Santa Clara County Executive Jeff Smith said Friday his county was expecting to release the data this weekend. Alameda County refused, making a similar privacy argument to one that was previously rejected in court, in a case brought by this news organization that forced disclosure of infection numbers of more than 400 at Tesla’s Fremont plant.

Going forward, if the Legislature and the governor really care about consumers and workers, especially essential employees who are often poor and people of color most vulnerable to the virus, they would ensure that state and county officials provide timely data that would enable informed decision-making. It should be readily available on websites for each county.

Indeed, release of such records was the clear purpose of AB 685, from San Bernardino County Democratic Assemblywoman Eloise Reyes, which passed last year. But many of the counties that are balking at releasing data are falling back on an absurd interpretation of the bill, claiming that they do not have to release the names of businesses.

To eliminate any ambiguity, Reyes has introduced a cleanup bill, AB 654. But thus far she hasn’t been able to muster the two-thirds support in the Assembly necessary for the urgency legislation. On the first Assembly floor vote on June 1, not only did Republicans fail to support it, so did 10 Democrats, including Bay Area Assemblymen Jim Frazier of Discovery Bay and Tim Grayson of Concord.

When workers and consumers want to know who doesn’t care about their welfare, they need only look at the lawmakers who voted no or simply abstained.

Californians should ask them why, more than 15 months into the state’s response to the pandemic, they think it’s OK for the Newsom administration and two-thirds of California counties to delay or outright stonewall providing basic information about whether businesses and workplaces are safe.

It’s time to end the secrecy.