Scramble at Loewensdorf
By: Grilled Squid
Tags: Covid, Coronavirus, Quarantine

The Loewensdorf DoH was unusually quiet about the news.

My dad’s diagnosis was out by 10am. By early afternoon, they typically gave an update about the looming Covid19 situation in town. At least that was their usual practice until a couple of days ago.

Several days back, when Loewensdorf got its first untraceable case of 2019-nCoV (as it was known then), they noticeably delayed the announcement until around 8pm. This was ironic, because in the announcement, they continued to state that the updates were correct as of 12pm.

With my dad’s case, they continued with the delays. That is fine — the updates only promised to be correct about the number of cases as of 12pm, but the updates also come with a lot of other information, such as each patient’s travel history and places that they visited, so it makes sense to give the contact tracing team time to compile all that information before releasing it to the public. If it takes 8 hours to compile the information, that seems fine to me. Besides, publishing an update on the Covid19 epidemic certainly should not be treated as lightly as publishing a new blog post — it needs to be given time to clear all layers of the hierarchy.

However, at 8pm, they continued to exclude my dad from the number of confirmed cases as of 12pm of the day of the diagnosis, even though they have had 10 hours to learn about it and include it in their report.

Maybe news goes around slowly; there are so many people being quarantined, diagnosed and discharged every day, it’s probably hard to keep track.

Oh, and we haven’t yet received our quarantine orders. Maybe they trust the doctors in my family to be socially responsible.

Within the family, we speculated about the reasons. We pretty much believed that, there being another symptomatic doctor in my family, maybe the DoH was worried about the panic that would ensue, if all his doctor contacts also had to be quarantined, and leave the hospital in severe shortage of medical staff. Others speculated that, with the announcement of my dad’s case, they would raise the alert level yet again.

It was also administratively annoying, because all of us had told our employers that a family member was a confirmed case, but we couldn’t point out to them which one he was. We were all taking voluntary leaves of absence, without explicit instructions from anyone. Problem much? Companies with less employer-employee trust might have raised hackles about such undocumented leaves of absence, and insisted that the affected employee come back to work, potentially heightening the risk of the disease spreading.

I wonder if the DoH could have released the full figures (i.e. including my dad) earlier in the day, and simply state that “contact tracing is underway for case X” instead of omitting case X from the announcement at all. In my mind, if they did this, the public wouldn’t crucify them for an omission of details that wasn’t available then, and would be supplied the following day anyway. Crucially, they would not have left a bad taste in our mouths or tarnished the trust we had in them to be truthful and timely with all their reporting.