Since the passage of House Bill 2016 at a special session in June, public cooperation with the Health Department's COVID-19 contract tracers has declined from a rate between 50 percent and 70 percent to about 14 percent now, according to Health Director Adrienne Byrne.
"This has severely tied the department's hands (in slowing virus spread) because it restricts the information that we can get from a case in regards to close contact," Byrne said.
One Republican legislator, Brenda Landwehr, however, argued that the real problem in getting people to cooperate may not be the bill, but the fear of public disclosure. HB 2016 was a bill negotiated between Gov. Laura Kelly and Republican legislative leaders wanting to curb her powers over the COVID-19 pandemic. It passed in a special session after Kelly had vetoed a similar but slightly stronger bill to restrict her authority that passed in the regular session.
One of the provisions of HB 2016 was called the COVID-19 Contact Tracing Privacy Act, written in response to complaints from some that data collection to track the pandemic had become too intrusive.
Byrne said the bill handcuffed her health investigators' ability to gather data needed to explain the current spike in cases.
Sedgwick County's had almost 14,000 cases of COVID confirmed, 349 new cases on Thursday alone, the most recent daily report. And the virus-positive test rate, a key measure of community spread, is at an all-time high of over 19 percent.
HB 2016 emphasizes that cooperating with COVID health investigators is entirely voluntary and it binds contact tracers with a lengthy list of rules, which carry misdemeanor criminal penalties if violated.
Byrne said "It's always been a choice" whether to cooperate in disease investigations.
But before HB 2016, investigators had more latitude in pressing for information, Byrne said.
"The investigators are trained and skilled at asking questions and (before HB 2016) if someone says 'Well, I don't really know if I want to provide that information,' then they would be able to explore what their hesitation was," she said. "Maybe it was that they thought their name was going to be shared or someone was going to get in trouble.
"Well, with House Bill 2016, if someone says 'Eh, I don't really think so,' then we have to stop. That's it," she said.
And even those who agree to cooperate are often providing incomplete information, she said.
For example, someone might tell a contact tracer they attended a church service, wedding or high-school football game, but won't tell which church, whose wedding or what high school, she said.
Byrne said her investigators aren't asking personal questions because they're nosy, but because they're trying to save lives.
"It's all about getting people who are ill, or potentially ill, out of circulation to slow the spread." Byrne said.
"For example, if someone (with COVID) has gone to an event, whether it's a church, or store, whatever it is, and we know that they've gone there, we can look at who they may have exposed," she said. "And they can get into quarantine so if they end up testing positive, they're not spreading it."
Whether the COVID privacy law is good or bad got mixed reactions from two area representatives on the House Health and Human Services Committee at the Statehouse.
Rep. Brenda Landwehr, a Wichita Republican, chairs the committee and doesn't have any immediate issues with the contact tracing part of HB 2016.
She said fear of public disclosure is probably a bigger barrier to cooperation with contact tracing.
"Maybe it has nothing to do with (HB) 2016, but it has more to do with people don't want their church, or their friends, to show up in the press and get them in trouble," Landwehr said. "I think the contact tracing for this is so different than any other contact tracing we have done" because businesses can suffer if they're identified as a COVID cluster.
"I think 2106 is an easy thing to blame," she said. "If it's something that needs to be revisited, we can."
But she also pointed out that the Democratic governor negotiated the package and it passed with broad bipartisan support.
The votes were 107-12 in the House and 26-12 in the Senate.
"People can keep whining about 2016 and they can keep complaining about it, they can keep blaming the Republican leadership about it, but when you look at the votes it wasn't Republicans that passed it," she said.
"That was a compromise bill and there's a lot of things in there that didn't make a lot of us happy," Landwehr said.
For example, while most businesses got exemption from COVID-related lawsuits, Landwehr said she wanted to extend that protection to nursing and long-term care homes to keep them from being driven to bankruptcy from lawsuits.
Rep. Elizabeth Bishop, a Wichita Democrat, predicted there will be little chance to make changes to HB 2016.
For one thing, the recent elections will create an atmosphere in the Legislature that is more anti-Kelly and anti-government intervention than the one that passed HB 2016, she said.
Also, people who are against protective facemasks and strong actions to control the spread of the virus have enormous influence at the Statehouse.
"It's another one of those instances where the individuals that should be speaking up in favor of processes that make contract tracing more effective won't," she said. "Those that are adamant that this is an abridgment of privacy rights will speak up, loudly."
She said HB 2016 is "sending the wrong message, that government is simply being intrusive and overly aggressive without looking at the goal of public health and saving lives."
"I agree that it's a balance (between privacy and public health), but I think the balance got shifted in the wrong direction."
It's part of the fallout of the ongoing and growing anti-government sentiment in Kansas, she said.
People in this divisive political climate "are way too ready to believe the negative and way to ready to overlook the competence and value of the services that are provided," she said. "I'm not expecting that to improve unless people wake up and pay more attention."
(c)2020 The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
