COVID-19 hot spots:
State report shows that residential care facilities and restaurants have been the most common settings for coronavirus outbreaks so far this year.
State data on COVID19 outbreaks shows that the most common settings for the spread of the disease in early 2021 are residential care facilities and restaurants.
The California Department of Public Health found that from Jan. 1 to March 1, the state had a total of 4,311 confirmed coronavirus outbreaks. In that period, 39,526 outbreakrelated cases were reported to the department.
Employers in industries other than health care are required to report to a local health department when they identify a minimum of three cases of the virus at a worksite within two weeks. Local health departments then make a determination on whether those cases are an outbreak as defined by the agency and report confirmed outbreaks to the department.
The agency included caveats to the data, including that some of the outbreaks may have happened last year and that the reporting was not exhaustive. While many of the settings identified were workplaces, the health department said the cases may have affected workers, other people in a community or visitors.
The agency found that residential care facilities saw 21.7% of the outbreaks, while restaurants accounted for 7%. Skilled nursing facilities had 4.2%, hospitals had 3.9%, and grocery stores and the construction industry had 3.5%, respectively.
The data is the first produced by the state under a California law, AB685, passed last year requiring employers to notify workers in writing
about outbreaks and take steps to protect them against the virus. It also requires that businesses notify local health authorities if infections become widespread, information that is then reported to the health department.
Emergency rules passed by California’s workplace safety regulator to prevent the spread of the virus at workplaces also require similar reporting and safeguards.
Business groups raised the alarm that the law could be used to name and shame businesses with outbreaks of the highly infectious virus, but data released by the department lists only industries and not workplace names.
The state health department noted in its release of the data that outbreaks in a particular setting do not equate to increased risk in that industry, “Because these data include only outbreaks reported to CDPH after Jan. 1, 2021, and many settings have been either closed or open with capacity restrictions.”
The Chronicle previously reported that most Bay Area counties do not identify businesses where outbreaks have taken place, despite other locations such as Los Angeles County and Oregon making that data publicly available.
Of the region’s 10 local health departments, only one made public the names of businesses that had seen outbreaks of the virus.
Some cited policies protecting medical privacy for withholding it, a defense that was recently overruled by a court that ordered Alameda County to release outbreak data for the Tesla manufacturing plant in Fremont.