VOSD Podcast: The COVID Data We've Been Fighting For

By Nate John, the Voice of San Diego

December 23, 2020

Voice of San Diego, along with KPBS and the San Diego Union-Tribune, have been fighting the county for data detailing where outbreaks of COVID-19 were happening. Other places, like Los Angeles, provide this kind of info — where and when people get infected with the coronavirus. But that’s not the case in San Diego.

As it stood in the beginning of the week, we’d lost our case against the county and appealed it, hoping we’d eventually see the numbers to help tell the story of what’s happened this year.

But then KPBS got the epic scoop.

County data secured by investigative reporters Katy Stegall and Claire Trageser show the locations where outbreaks happened. Stegall and Trageser joined VOSD host Scott Lewis on the podcast this week to talk about what they found, how to read the data and important points to keep in mind when absorbing it all.

Here are a couple of findings to get you started before the interview:

• Around 20 percent of outbreaks occurred in restaurants. Some – like Olive Garden and the Cheesecake Factory – experienced multiple outbreaks.
• Big box stores like Target and Wal-Mart also accounted for a significant chunk of the outbreaks.
• More than 600 individual COVID cases were also linked to casinos.

Plus, a super important caveat: An “outbreak” is not necessarily an outbreak. In this case, it means at least three people who had COVID visited a certain place over a 14-day period. So that means, particularly in places like the big box stores, there may have been no transmission of COVID in the stores. What it may mean instead is that many, many people came through the doors of those stores and some of them happened to have COVID.

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