For the last two weeks, we have received updates from the Arizona Department of Health Services, Yavapai County Community Health Services department and various other entities tracking the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States and overseas, and posted them to our Facebook pages. We try to do this once a day.
We are now supplementing this data with updated bed censuses from Verde Valley Medical Center and Flagstaff Medical Center, provided by Northern Arizona Healthcare.
YCCHS Public Health Coordinator Terri Farneti has done an excellent job keeping the media updated about the county’s effort during the outbreak, but the information she provides is limited by those county officials above her who set policy.
With each of our posts on social media, we indicates that there are “X number” of cases in Yavapai County, “X number” of patients in the Prescott area and “X number” of patients in the Verde Valley.
About one person a day comments that they want the number per town rather than the general region.
We would too; we are not hiding this information. Until this week, it was simply not provided by the county, despite our attempts to provide you, our readers, with this information.
However, Larson Newspapers journalist Jon Hecht, our point man in Cottonwood where Verde Valley Medical Center and the local Yavapai County Community Health Services office is located, doggedly pursued this information.
YCCHS Director Leslie Horton’s argument against providing us and you taxpayers with this data is that the information could be used to identify individual patients. However, the county is not technically bound by privacy restrictions in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
“The reason we had to move from identifying cases by city, is that the individual cases could be too easily identified in smaller rural towns,” Horton wrote in an email to Hecht. “Originally, our cases were all in Prescott or Sedona, both of which have an adequate population base to allow for sharing the information.
“However, at the point where cases began being identified in our smaller towns, we made the decision to regionalize the cases into Verde Valley or Prescott/ Quad-Cities area, in order to protect the individual’s privacy.”
While the argument does hold some validity, our towns and cities are fairly large enough to avoid such identifiers. The county also has some wiggle room. If a town or city in the county has say, more than four or five cases, the county could provide more general numbers.
Undaunted by Horton’s obfuscation, Hecht contacted Kristen Rosati, the former president of the American Health Lawyers Association, and an attorney at the Phoenix-based firm Coppersmith Brockelman PLC, specializing in the application of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Rosati said, “Most county governments do not have to comply with HIPAA, because HIPAA only applies to HIPAA covered entities,” such as medical providers, health insurers, health care clearinghouses and businesses that handle health care information.
“County governments usually don’t have to comply with HIPAA because they don’t fall within those categories,” Rosati told Hecht. “But the caveat for it is that the only real concrete standard around for de-identifying information is the HIPAA de-identification standards, so lots of other organizations who are concerned about individual privacy will follow the HIPAA regulations.”
With these facts in hand and due to Hecht’s tireless efforts to goad the county into being more location-specific, late on Monday, April 6, YCCHS began revealing more details about where some residents are located, and we will provide these details to you.
Will the information change your behavior or the course of the disease in our county or state? No, not really, but it does give people another data point to track and another way to grasp the locality of the outbreak.
Right now, with so many readers stuck at home, with hundreds of businesses and facilities closed by choice or government order, they are feeling isolated and powerless. Providing more data and numbers gives readers a sense of control — as fleeting as it is — that they have over this outbreak.
Statistically, it also provides us with a trackable, measurable data point to see how the disease is progressing on about the most local level we are going to get.
Christopher Fox Graham
Larson Newspapers
