Eric Mark
Standard-Speaker, Hazleton, Pa.
LUZERNE COUNTY, Pa. — Luzerne County recently rejected a request from the state Health Department to sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for getting more information about COVID-19 patients, including street addresses.
The proposed agreement would have put the county at risk of losing millions of dollars in state funding and exposed anyone who inadvertently violated the terms of the agreement to potential criminal charges, county 911 Executive Director Fred Rosencrans said Wednesday.
“We tried to work through the very stringent restrictions,” Rosencrans said. “It would have required a sign-off from every end user of the system.”
In addition to losing state funding for 911, other potential penalties for violating the agreement include:
- A $5,000 fine.
- Referral of the wrongdoing to criminal justice officials.
- Suspension of existing state awards to or contracts with the county.
- Prohibition of any new state award or contracts for up to three years.
The Health Department contacted counties throughout the state earlier this month, in response to requests the department provide more information about patients who tested positive for the virus, Rosencrans said.
The department said it would provide information such as street addresses at which COVID-19 patients reside, he said. First responders felt that information was important so they could be prepared to deal with calls that might involve coronavirus, Rosencrans said.
However, the health department said it would only release additional information if county officials signed an agreement pledging not to disclose that information to the public or the media.
The way in which the county’s emergency communication system is set up, as well as the number of people throughout the county who have access to the system, make it impossible to guarantee the information would be protected, Rosencrans said.
Addresses of COVID-19 patients would need to be added as a “premises alert” in the communication system, and that information would then be available to all police, firefighters, emergency medical crews and other first responders county-wide, Rosencrans said.
“I would not be able to protect that information from anyone,” he said. “I would have to obtain thousands of signatures.”
The county asked the health department for an exception, but the request was denied last week, Rosencrans said.
In the absence of additional information from the state, county emergency dispatchers are screening all calls for the potential they could involve a COVID-19 patient, Rosencrans said.
“We’ve been questioning every 911 caller if they have symptoms of COVID,” he said. “We’ve been very proactive from the beginning.”
The health department cites a state patient privacy law from the 1950s as the reason for not revealing information without a strict agreement in place, Rosencrans said.
The state Senate is considering proposed legislation that would authorize the release of information about communicable disease patients to 911 dispatchers and emergency responders as a public safety measure, he said.
However, even if state lawmakers adopt that bill, it will likely come too late to help deal with the coronavirus pandemic, according to Rosencrans.
“From the county’s standpoint, it’s not feasible for us to jeopardize the funding for 911,” he said.
Rosencrans said he feels street-address information, at minimum, should be available to first responders, but that is not up to him or the county.
“I don’t want any first responder to think we did not share this information if we could,” he said.
———
©2020 the Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, Pa.)