[Goose]

Among the feedback I've given to my county supervisor is that I'm frustrated that with thousands of cases, the county is not revealing characteristics of those that get infected.  It would be easy for the county to gather information with surveys of a week's worth of cases (N > 500) to give insight onto many potential lifestyle features that may help other citizens to know what activities may be associated with avoiding or risking infection.   Virtually all they are revealing is aggregate gender, age, and zip code.

I am quite certain the County actually does have a lot of this "characteristic" information based on what (little) SMC has actually revealed. While the counties (like everybody else) are novices with COVED-19, they have significant experience tracking other diseases (on a much smaller scale). They know what data to gather, at least to a large extent. While vastly overloaded, they are not novices in epidemiology. Normally, the State does a lot of the analysis because in normal times each county data set is too small and they can't afford to pay full time analysis folks for a very few cases. Dr. Morrow says it isn't happening at the State level. Could be sour grapes, but I myself expect it is largely true. Like many other parts of our PHS, we haven't had to rely on these folks to do their jobs, so their budgets have been cut, the good people have left, and the vestigial capability remaining just isn't up to the task. I suspect most people didn't even know the State did such things.

As a side note, I suggest people read
https://www.smchealth.org/health-officer...-statement

It is a bit dated, but it does provide some valuable perspective on how San Mateo County sees it's problems. While I don't agree with everything Scott Morrow has done, I think he is entirely rational and (unlike some other Health Department Heads) explains his positions, even in cases he didn't get his preferred outcome.

[Goose]

Among the feedback I've given to my county supervisor is that I'm frustrated that with thousands of cases, the county is not revealing characteristics of those that get infected.  It would be easy for the county to gather information with surveys of a week's worth of cases (N > 500) to give insight onto many potential lifestyle features that may help other citizens to know what activities may be associated with avoiding or risking infection.   Virtually all they are revealing is aggregate gender, age, and zip code.

I am quite certain the County actually does have a lot of this "characteristic" information based on what (little) SMC has actually revealed. While the counties (like everybody else) are novices with COVED-19, they have significant experience tracking other diseases (on a much smaller scale). They know what data to gather, at least to a large extent. While vastly overloaded, they are not novices in epidemiology. Normally, the State does a lot of the analysis because in normal times each county data set is too small and they can't afford to pay full time analysis folks for a very few cases. Dr. Morrow says it isn't happening at the State level. Could be sour grapes, but I myself expect it is largely true. Like many other parts of our PHS, we haven't had to rely on these folks to do their jobs, so their budgets have been cut, the good people have left, and the vestigial capability remaining just isn't up to the task. I suspect most people didn't even know the State did such things.

As a side note, I suggest people read
https://www.smchealth.org/health-officer...-statement

It is a bit dated, but it does provide some valuable perspective on how San Mateo County sees it's problems. While I don't agree with everything Scott Morrow has done, I think he is entirely rational and (unlike some other Health Department Heads) explains his positions, even in cases he didn't get his preferred outcome.