San Mateo County won’t release school infection rate data

When students began to return to in-person classes last year, officials with County Health and the Office of Education agreed the county would not be the distributor of COVID-19 infection figures, Superintendent Nancy Magee said. 

Instead, the responsibility was placed on individual districts to determine how to report new infections found on campuses to students and families. Schools are required by California law to alert entire school communities of any infections and special notices are given to anyone who has been traced as a close contact. 

While some districts have developed weekly-updated dashboards to inform the public of infections, many still do not have publicly accessible information in place. Magee said her office is actively working with districts to develop dashboards which will eventually pull figures reported to the state’s digital contact tracing portal, School Portal for Outbreak Tracking. 

Safeguarding trust 

Education and health officials have said that infections are likely to pop up on school campuses as COVID-19 rates remain high in the broader community. Safety measures like improved ventilation systems, masking, sanitizing and getting vaccinated are intended to help prevent the virus from spreading as rampantly in school settings as it has seen in public, Srinivasan said.

Though new infections are requested to be reported to both County Health and the Office of Education, Magee said her department does not have an adequate system in place to accurately relay the data. In an interview on Wednesday, Magee said those figures are more accurately kept by County Health. 

Knowing that infections will occur on campus, County Health spokesperson Preston Merchant said in an email that contact tracers need an “environment of privacy and trust” when working with students, their families, staff and administrators to determine who may have been infected. 

“We believe that not sharing data publicly about school outbreaks protects those relationships, encourages participation in contact tracing, and allows processes for testing, isolation and quarantine to be effective in preventing further exposure, especially when children under 12 are not eligible for vaccination,” Merchant said. 

Schools are required to report all COVID-19 infections to County Health but Srinivasan said the department fears that schools would be less likely to comply with the state mandate to report if they knew those figures would be released to the public, even if done without specific school-by-school or district-by-district attribution. 

COVID-19 figures have routinely been updated and released to the public, including infections and deaths broken down by race, age, gender and city, acute and intensive care hospitalizations and infections in long-term care facilities. 

Since vaccines became available, dashboards have also been used to provide the public a closer look at the county’s rollout, showing which communities were taking advantage of vaccine clinics and which were trailing. Those numbers were again broken down by age, race, gender, vaccine product and location. 

County Manager Mike Callagy stood by the county’s previous transparency measures, stressing the importance of government agencies to communicate such information to the public whether good or bad.

“They have a right to know what’s going on with the latest information, whether it’s good or bad,” Callagy said. “People need to know so we’re going to always be transparent. That’s the way government has to be.”

Necessary communication 

Still, Srinivasan doubled down on the policy to withhold data on school infections, saying County Health has no plans to release the data despite some districts and neighboring jurisdictions opting to do so. Reflecting on the county dashboards, she said those data points are provided through the state unlike individual district numbers which she said can be misleading. 

Rather than provide the public with figures, she said the department’s current priority is to assist districts with communicating information itself and performing contact tracing. 

“We in County Health have an important role to play in supporting schools,” Srinivasan said. 

Magee agreed with Srinivasan, saying the numbers released at the county level could fail to provide a nuanced understanding of where the virus was contracted and whether it was passed between students. She argued that districts should be the entities to report their figures given that administrators know their school communities better than the county.

David Canepa, president of the Board of Supervisors, said infection rate data and similar information should be readily accessible to the public. Reflecting on the past nearly 18 months, the father of a 4-year-old said the pandemic has shown that greater transparency has been a benefit to both the public and government agencies. 

Giving school district and the Office of Education “the benefit of the doubt,” Canepa said he feels confident each district would develop its own dashboards.

“It’s my hope moving forward that the school districts will release that information. I think it’s good for the parents, I think it’s good for the students and I think it’s good for the teacher,” Canepa said. “We’ve had an incredible partnership with the school districts and County Health. I’m confident that this issue will be resolved and that all information will be forthcoming and accessible.”

sierra@smdailyjournal.com 

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