SALEM — A proposal for a bill to compel the state to keep aggregate data relating to reportable disease investigations as public information remains alive in the ongoing 2021 Oregon Legislature.

Senate Bill 719 had a public hearing last week and has a work session on Wednesday, March 31. The bill is in the Senate Committee on Health Care. According to the text of the proposal, “Aggregate data derived from information obtained by the authority or a local public health administrator in the course of an investigation of a reportable disease or disease outbreak are not confidential or exempt from disclosure” under specific sections of Oregon’s public records law “unless the data could reasonably lead to the identification of an individual.”

Sen. Bill Hansell does not serve on that committee but explained most bills that did not have a hearing or work session by March 19 were dead in the Senate. A bill can’t exit a committee to head to a floor vote without a work session. Oregon’s constitutional limit of 160 days for the Legislature, he said, firms up scheduling to consider new laws. But at this point in the session, he said, plenty of proposals are done.

SB 719, though, is pitting public interest in data about the coronavirus against health agencies concerned with revealing an individual’s private health information.

Two Portland Democrats, Sen. Michael Dembrow and Rep. Karin A. Power, are the chief sponsors of the bill. Hansell said they were liberal progressives who tend not to want to infringe on people’s privacy, and in looking at 719, he said, there seem to be “lot of caveats” to ensure that’s the case.

Prior to the public hearing on Wednesday, March 24, the committee received testimony against and for the bill.

Collette Young, administrator of the OHA’s Center for Public Health Practice, opposed the bill in a March 15 letter. Using an example of an E. coli outbreak, she explained epidemiologists early on had suspected hummus had sickened several people, but it turned out all six also had eaten spinach, a vehicle for E. coli outbreaks.

“Had we been required to release our statistical compilations prematurely, they would have incorrectly impugned the hummus,” she stated.

Also, she continued, “a requirement to respond to a public records request for data in such situations would derail the epidemiologist who was collecting and analyzing the data, slowing the investigation, and delaying the outbreak solution.”

Young also argued that releasing “aggregate” data from numerically small populations could lead to the identification of individuals.

“Naming the reportable disease causing a death in a person of a specific age, such as an infant in a small county, would effectively tell what the infant died of to those who know of the death,” according to Young. “Correlating relatively uncommon demographic features with diseases, even in aggregate, can betray protected health information.”

Young, however, did not explain how someone’s health information is private once they are dead. Oregon State Police, for example, routinely identify victims of fatal crashes.

The bill also received plenty of support.

The Oregon Progressive Party and Independent Party of Oregon back the bill, telling the committee in a March 15 letter, “The Oregon Health Authority has been refusing to release key statistics used to justify and monitor reopening of business in the COVID pandemic,” including in mid-2020 when the state health agency stopped releasing public daily tallies of new county hospitalizations.

Erin Kissane, co-founder of The COVID Tracking Project and a resident of Astoria, submitted testimony supporting passage of the bill.

“Although Oregon received an ‘A’ grade in our 2020 state assessments, we have noted several meaningful deficits in the state’s public COVID-19 data,” Kissane stated, including “problems with public testing and case data, as well as deficits in the state’s reporting on COVID-19 outbreaks, cases and deaths in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities.

Kissane also argued it is troubling the Oregon Health Authority refuses to provide the aggregate data it uses to produce visuals and arguments about public health interventions.

“Without providing access to the data behind such claims,” she stated, “the OHA is asking members of the public to take its statements on trust — a trust it has not consistently earned.”

In a recent example, Kissane referred to The Oregonian’s reporting on March 13.

The OHA touted that it was allocating 15,000 first doses per week for seniors at the Portland metro area’s three mass vaccination sites — and this allocation would increase vaccines available to residents 65 and older in four Oregon counties by “about 50%.” But when reporters pressed, according to Kissane, “the OHA eventually conceded that doses at these facilities are not allocated to specific groups of recipients, and that OHA therefore didn’t know how many doses had previously been given to seniors, nor how many new doses would be administered to seniors.”

And the Oregonian reporters found the true week-over-week increase in doses for these facilities was only 19%. Kissane stated Oregon residents deserve access to the data behind OHA’s claims.

“SB 719 explicitly targets the release of aggregate data that can serve valid public interests without compromising the privacy of the individuals whose vaccinations, illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths are represented in these data,” she concluded.

Tom Holt, a lobbyist for the Society of Professional Journalists, also submitted testimony in favor of the bill.

“The Health Authority has and continues to make recommendations and decisions that affect all Oregonians, and there is a clear public interest in the high-level data used to make those recommendations and decisions,” Holt told the committee, “and not just vague charts or other summaries selectively released by an agency.”

Holt pointed out SB 719 does not require OHA to create aggregated data reports in response to an information request, nor does the bill compel the release of sensitive, individually identifiable information, but specifically exempts from disclosure information “that reasonably could lead to the identification of an individual.” A public health agency can deny a request for data from an area with a sparse population if that data could lead to identification of an individual.

What the bill would require, Holt stated, is the release of aggregate information that agencies have at their fingertips.

• Summary: SB 719 provides that certain aggregate data relating to reportable disease investigations are not confidential or exempt from disclosure under public records law unless data could reasonably lead to the identification of individual. Declares emergency, effective on passage.

• The bill is in the Senate Committee on Health Care.

• Freshman Sen. Deb Patterson, D-Salem, chairs the committee, and Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, is the vice chair. The committee plans to meet for a work session Wednesday, March 31, at 1 p.m. to discuss SB 719 and several other bills.

• For more information, go to olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2021R1/Committees/SHC/2021-03-31-13-00/Agenda.