June 4, 2020 at 3:24 p.m.
Health department policy is irresponsible panic-mongering
Health department policy is irresponsible panic-mongering
Make no mistake about it, this is an irresponsible public health policy that will do absolutely nothing for public health, but it has the potential to cause severe injury to the businesses named, perhaps, if she continues, forcing some to close forever.
For starters, let's begin to examine why this policy is so bad with a simple enough fact - the decision to name a business or not to name a business is Ms. Conlon's alone. She may have criteria and guidance in place, and she may consult with others, but as the public health officer, she has the absolute statutory authority to fashion those criteria and make those decisions, short of her removal or a court decision rendering her legal authority null and void.
We don't know what the courts might do - local public health authority is thankfully being challenged in federal court - but we know what Oneida County board chairman Dave Hintz is going to do to stop this abuse of power: Nothing.
Mr. Hintz says he's standing by his public health officer, and, unless he is overruled by the full county board, that means she can have her will and way with the county's economy. In short, Mr. Hintz has abdicated the throne, and, as of today, Ms. Conlon is the unelected and quite powerful bureaucratic ruler of Oneida County's economy.
She can destroy a business with the issuance of a press release.
This is problematic because, while Ms. Conlon is a credentialed and licensed public health official, she is also an accomplished bureaucrat long embedded in county government, and even a cursory review of the criteria she is using to dismantle small businesses - with apparently no thought to the damage she is causing, or least without any care - shows she is looking at things through the bureaucratic rather than the scientific lens, the latter of which requires critical thinking.
In Ms. Conlon's view, with contact tracing becoming ever more difficult, the health department is doing the residents of the county a public service by naming these businesses. In her way of thinking, publicizing that a Covid-19 positive individual visited an establishment on such and such date while infectious and had close contact with people could prompt those who have been potentially infected to take measures to protect themselves and others.
The reality is, the chance that people who might have been at one of those establishments on that day would see the press release is decidedly marginal to begin with, but, even if they did see it, almost two weeks had glided by by the time the positive test was administered, the health department notified, and the press release issued.
By that time, these people no doubt had many other close contacts and those close contacts then created their own close contacts (and so on), so much so that the press release was rendered virtually meaningless and absurd even before Ms. Conlon dreamed it up. It's preposterous on its face.
Not to mention that most people who might have been infected would be sick by that time anyway. They wouldn't need a press release to tell them what was going on.
Now, if issuing a press release caused no harm, it could have been justified. Maybe someone somewhere might benefit - every millennia or so someone finds the needle in the haystack - but such press releases in fact can cause incalculable harm.
In the Northwoods and across the state and nation, people have been slow to return to their normal routines as the economy reopens. That is to be expected. Virtually every mainstream media outlet has piled on doomsday headline after doomsday headline, even as the grim events predicted in those headlines failed to materialize. Rightly or wrongly, the media has scared the wits out of people, and the actual lockdowns have only reinforced the fear.
So people are scared, and why wouldn't they be? Taken together, the media and the government message is that the only safe place to be is under your bed, perhaps forevermore, and, oh yeah, don't trust any contact with your family, either.
Apparently the only acceptable social activity that's safe to engage in is social justice rioting.
So, as people gather up the courage to venture out, maybe go out to dinner, and start to make their choices, and they see a press release announcing so-and-so to be a Covid-19 hotspot, where do you think they will choose to go, even if they weren't near so-and-so on the dates in question?
Will they go to so-and-so, aka that Covid-19 place, or to an unnamed competitor? This ain't rocket science. What it really is is panic-mongering on the part of Linda Conlon and the Oneida County Health Department.
The thing about it is, as we report today, there is absolutely no scientific justification for naming those businesses, and the criteria Ms. Conlon employed demonstrates that fact.
First, she defines close contact as being within six feet of someone for 15 minutes or more. Well, OK, that comes from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but the CDC also cautions that that is purely an arbitrary number that is a best estimate in many situations, but not nearly in all.
That is to say, in health care settings the time might be shorter and in outdoors settings it might be longer and it all also depends upon the type of interaction.
Here's the CDC's bottom line: "Data are insufficient to precisely define the duration of time that constitutes a prolonged exposure."
So, if that's the case, why is Linda Conlon using that measure to brand specific businesses with her very public Scarlet Letter, and why shouldn't the county be sued for ignoring the CDC's cautions and causing discriminatory economic pain?
The other part of Ms. Conlon's close-contact criteria is that the close contact must occur while the person is considered potentially infectious and not isolated (otherwise known as the contact elicitation window), which, as she pointed out, was defined as starting from 48 hours before illness onset or, for asymptomatic clients, 10 days prior to the collection of a specimen leading to a positive test.
That was also classic CDC guidance - until it wasn't.
Receiving new information that asymptomatic persons may have a lower viral burden at diagnosis compared to symptomatic cases, on May 29 the CDC changed the longer contact elicitation window guidance from 10 days prior to the collection of a specimen to two days prior.
That makes all the difference in the world.
According to the old guidance, for an asymptomatic person testing positive on May 28, the department would go in search of contacts made during 10 prior days to specimen collection. But if that person tested positive on May 30, the department would go in search of close contacts for only two prior days, meaning establishments visited nearly two weeks earlier, as was the case with the named businesses in Oneida County, would never have been contacted.
Again we don't know if the individual in Oneida County was asymptomatic, and that's a hypothetical example, but the fluidity of the guidance being issued because of rapidly changing data shows how flawed it is to set public policy by such guidances. Such guidance is as temporary as it is arbitrary, and it is simply irresponsible and harmful to have set a policy of fingering establishments based on such flimsy scientific foundations.
Guidance that is useful and that provides insight and information in internal processes, such as private contact tracing, can become reckless and dangerous when used as a rigid formula to publicly condemn citizens and businesses.
More than that, it's discriminatory. The changed CDC contact elicitation window guidance, as well the situational context of interactions, shows how the risks of infection can be overstated in such places as restaurants, bars, and smaller retail stores, but studies have shown how the disease could be spread in a grocery store, too, indicating that the health department's criteria could understate the risks in other stores.
Indeed, Finnish researchers have studied how extremely small airborne aerosol particles emitted from the respiratory tract when coughing, sneezing, or even talking are transported in the air, and they modeled a scenario where a person coughs in an aisle between shelves, like those found in grocery stores.
The researchers found that the aerosol cloud took up to several minutes to disperse: "Someone infected by the coronavirus can cough and walk away, but then leave behind extremely small aerosol particles carrying the coronavirus. These particles could then end up in the respiratory tract of others in the vicinity," said professor Ville Vuorinen.
Now we're not saying going to the grocery story is risky. The model is extremely unlikely. But the possibility of infection exists - proved by the growing numbers of infected grocery store workers - and what it means is that every business visited by a Covid-19 positive person poses some risk, however small.
That includes, as Rep. Rob Swearingen says, grocery stores, big box retailers, home improvement centers, convenience stores, and others. Either all businesses who are visited by a positive-tested person should be named, or none should.
We vote for none, for it simply is impossible to track down all such businesses, and, more than that, the risk is slim for those who protect themselves and who patronize businesses that have followed safety protocols, as the named businesses in Oneida County did.
Such businesses do not deserve to be targeted on arbitrary grounds that are not supported by solid science. That the criteria in place targets only certain establishments makes the policy not only discriminatory but vindictive, and the county should demand that it be ended now.
Our economy needs not only to reopen but to grow and thrive; it does not need to display the bright scarlet Conlon letter as a billboard for the North, or feel the chokehold of a bureaucrat's hands around its neck.
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