Pa.’s shaky protocol for notifying people of possible COVID-19 exposure at the polls

Philadelphia case highlights work remaining to be done ahead of the general election

• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

Voters wait in a socially distanced line outside their polling place in Philadelphia on June 23, 2020.

Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

Voters wait in a socially distanced line outside their polling place in Philadelphia.

Are election and health officials prepared to respond to potential coronavirus exposure at the polls during the presidential election in Pennsylvania?

Not quite, it appears, at least not everywhere, based on how things went during the primary.

The matter of notifying voters, election workers, poll watchers and others that they might have been exposed seems like it should be straightforward. Unlike most other mass gatherings, elections provide a way to directly alert participants because of the voter registration database.

But it’s not clear health and election authorities would avail themselves of that resource, should the need arise.

Andrea Johnson, a Philadelphia woman who spent the primary as a poll watcher and later tested positive for COVID-19, recently shared her story with me — including her concern that city officials hadn’t notified voters despite her best efforts to stress to them potential risk at her polling place June 2.

“My whole objective is to make sure that the communities that I serve are safe, … and that we’re made aware,” said Johnson, who hasn’t had symptoms despite her positive result. “People aren’t getting tested, and you don’t know how many people like myself are walking around with a virus, and we don’t know … unless and until we get tested.”

I teamed up with my colleague Katie Meyer of WHYY to look into it.

It turns out, some other counties — including some of the most populous — probably would’ve handled things the same way, we found.

Just two told us otherwise.

Of course, the situation is more complicated than it might appear at first. To start, Philly reportedly has just a dozen contact tracers — though city health officials told Katie they’re increasing the ranks, with 50 staffers in training right now.

Counties’ contact tracing strategies and capabilities vary widely across Pennsylvania.

But it’s “worrisome,” as Centre County Commissioner Michael Pipe put it, that state and county officials aren’t already moving in lockstep when it comes to public notice following a known potential risk of exposure at the polls. Pipe says state officials need to get a plan in place asap.

 “We all appreciate they were moving at a very fast clip and trying to take care of a lot of things [before the primary],” Pipe said. “But we’re going to have this pandemic in November. So, they should really have a very robust program for how they notify people, if they get sick at the polls.”

Read the full story here.

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