TUESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
A4
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EDITORIAL
Depriving
the public
What’s broken about Oregon’s public records laws re-
mains broken. And every year that goes by with it broken,
the public’s ability to know what its government is doing is
diminished.
Oregon’s public records laws are well-intentioned. They
are also fl awed.
The structure of the law creates a perverse incentive for
high fees. Public bodies are not given incentives to make
public documents available at low cost. The laws give them
the power to charge reasonable fees to recoup their costs.
That gives them no incentive to keep those costs as low as
possible. And any fee — no matter how small it may seem
— can be like a wall blocking the public from information.
While there are ways for the public to appeal decisions to
release documents, it’s nowhere near as simple to get fees
reduced.
The problem is easier to understand with examples.
This fi rst one we heard from Rachel Alexander, the man-
aging editor of the Salem Reporter. She also chairs the
Oregon Freedom of Information Committee of the Society
of Professional Journalists.
She spoke with Oregon’s Public Record Advisory Council
earlier this month.
Remember earlier this year when then-Oregon State
University president F. King Alexander resigned? There
were questions about his role in the sexual misconduct
investigations at Louisiana State University. A reporter for
the Albany Democrat-Herald fi led a narrow public records
request asking for email among Alexander and several
members of OSU’s board of trustees. It was emails for a
period of about a week. OSU said it would require an IT
expert to search for emails and came back with a $250 bill.
A $250 fee might seem like nothing. It’s a barrier. As you
may have heard, most newspapers are struggling for mon-
ey these days. Many smaller newspapers have zero budgets
for public record requests. The newspaper was only able
to get the records after Oregon’s Society for Professional
Journalists awarded it a grant to do so. The emails showed
the work some members of the board of trustees were doing
behind the scenes to help Alexander craft messaging.
Here’s one more example. This one we heard from Ellen
Osoinach, an attorney working for the Reporters Commit-
tee for Freedom of the Press. It comes thanks to the work of
the Eugene Weekly and the Catalyst Journalism Project at
the University of Oregon.
Landon Payne came home one night in Eugene in
March 2020. After being drug free for about three years, he
was high on meth. He believed people were trying to kill
him. His wife called the police. He was arrested for a child
support warrant. He was restrained and Tased.
When he was brought to the Lane County Jail, depu-
ties had diffi culty restraining him. He ended up on the
concrete fl oor. Two deputies put their knees on him to hold
him down. “I can’t breathe,” Payne said. His heart stopped
just over a minute later. Deputies and emergency medical
personnel managed to revive him with 20 minutes of CPR.
Payne died two days later.
An incident like that raises a lot of questions. Could it
have been handled differently? Did police have other op-
tions? Did they have the training to be aware of them? And
it’s also important to know exactly what did happen when
Payne was arrested and at the jail.
The Eugene Weekly was able to get the video for the sal-
ly port, where Payne was brought at the jail. It also wanted
to see the body camera videos for the offi cers involved. The
initial public records request in April 2021 for the body
worn cameras was denied. The city of Eugene wrote it “does
not provide Body Worn Camera video.” The Eugene Weekly
appealed that decision to the Lane County District Attor-
ney with the help of attorney Osoinach. The Lane County
District Attorney ordered the videos released because of the
clear public interest. But the price of one and half hours of
body camera video? It was more than $600. The Eugene
Weekly and Catalyst paid for that video. Think, though,
about that cost. It is a barrier for anyone hoping to learn
the truth about how the Eugene police handled a critical
incident.
If the solution to this fee issue were simple, of course, it
would already be fi xed. Many government agencies have
a culture of transparency and openness. They try to be
forthcoming about records, making them available swiftly
and at minimal or no cost.
But even for government agencies with that culture,
not every public records request is easy to tackle. Sweeping
requests may require pouring through hundreds of emails
or documents, taking signifi cant staff time. Imagine what
that would be like for a small town with few staff.
There are solutions out there. Some states put limits
on what can be charged. Some jurisdictions bar charging
for time spent researching if a record may be exempt from
disclosure. The federal government defi nes what can be
charged for FOIA requests. As Alexander put it, relying on
shoestring efforts of journalists to crowdfund public records
requests is no solution.
We don’t expect the Legislature will take on this issue in
the short 2022 session. At least another year will pass with
Oregon’s broken public records laws. It will be another year
where the public’s right to know is diminished.
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City
Herald. Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express
the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the
Baker City Herald.
Your views
We need to stand against tyranny
of political dictators
To all that say an emergency lasts
for 2½ years.
Governor Kate Brown once again
extended her declaration of a state
of emergency in Oregon, citing the
impending omicron variant surge. “As
Oregon prepares for what could be our
worst surge in hospitalizations during
this pandemic, I know that this is not
the beginning of the new year any of us
had hoped for,” said Dictator Brown. It
is what she had hoped for! She wants
to leave offi ce thinking she can get
everything she wants in spite of who or
what she destroys.
Since when is an emergency for
2½ years, the defi nition of emergency
is — a serious, unexpected, and often
dangerous situation requiring immedi-
ate action. The defi nition of immediate
is — occurring at once; happening
without delay or near the present time.
How is immediate been going on for 2½
years?
We all know omicron is infectious
but so are all these mandates. So is
tuberculosis, so is pneumonia, so is
measles, so is chicken pox, so is mumps,
so is smallpox, any disease is infectious.
Businesses, the children, our liveli-
hoods, everyone’s mental health are all
at stake.
Each governor and/or mayor wants
to be the fi rst, especially on the West
Coast. When are we, and I mean ev-
eryone, going to stand up against these
dictators?
The people at Tiananmen Square in
China stood up against rows of tanks.
When are we going to stand up against
our “tanks” of tyranny?
Penny Rienks
Baker City
OTHER VIEWS
Putt ing pandemic in context
By JIM DOWNS
Since the start of the pandemic,
public health authorities have been fas-
tidiously counting the number of people
infected with the coronavirus. For both
the medical profession and the media,
these rising fi gures have been the
principal way of framing the pandemic
in the U.S.: “124,000 new cases a day,”
“802,000 COVID deaths since Febru-
ary 2020.” But this information offers
an incomplete picture of the crisis,
potentially warping the public’s under-
standing in ways that could prolong the
pandemic and even add to its toll.
What’s missing from the day-to-
day conversation is the number of
uninfected people and the number of
infected people who survive COVID-19.
That provides a denominator to put the
other fi gures in context. If there were
124,000 new infections per day, how
many people were exposed? If 802,000
people died from COVID, how many
were infected but didn’t die?
Indeed, such information is the most
underreported story of the pandemic.
But it has long been an important piece
of public health information. It ad-
vances our understanding of the nature
of the disease; it hints at the power of
precautions such as masks and vac-
cines; and it can allay fears and trauma
that people are experiencing about the
seemingly never-ending nature of the
pandemic.
Our reliance on numbers to under-
stand epidemics can be traced to the
development of epidemiology — when
medical and scientifi c authorities
had not yet uncovered how microbes
caused the spread of infectious disease.
Between 1755 and 1866, when epide-
miology emerged, medical practitioners
believed that environmental factors
caused disease. Based on this inac-
curate view, they had few effective
metrics to understand the origins of
epidemics. As such, they counted the
number of uninfected and infected
patients; the number who contracted a
disease and the number who died; they
examined those who were hospitalized
and those released.
Counting was a way to rationalize
infectious disease and to create a nar-
rative about it. For example, during the
Crimean War in the 1850s, the nurse
and statistician Florence Nightingale
witnessed that more British soldiers
died once they were admitted to the
hospital, but she couldn’t see the germs
that were infecting them. What she
could see, she counted: the number of
healthy and the number of sick sol-
diers, inside and outside hospitals. By
creating a clear analytical assessment,
she then observed how the unsanitary
conditions within hospitals correlated
with alarming mortality rates. Accord-
ing to Nightingale, a “complete system
of sanitary statistics in the army” was
necessary “to administer the laws of
health with that certainty.”
Statistics, and exploring the
behaviors behind them, became a key
component in epidemiological analysis
because that’s all that health experts
had — and it helped them craft treat-
ment strategies.
In response to a cholera outbreak
in Calcutta, known today as Kolkata,
William Twining, a British military
doctor there, published an infl uential
comprehensive volume on diseases in
1832. The treatise provided copious
detail of hospital attendants who came
into close contact with cholera patients
and soiled linens but did not become ill.
Had the text focused solely on people
who became sick, a reader might have
been misled about the risk of the dis-
ease, or led to look for its causes in the
wrong place. With context about the
unaffl icted, the study offered key evi-
dence that cholera was not transmitted
through direct contact.
It was another set of counterexam-
ples two decades later that helped the
young science of epidemiology to zero in
on the culprit. John Snow, a physician
in London, famously found the common
denominator among cholera cases in an
1854 outbreak: Those who became sick
seemed to all have drunk water from a
pump in the center of a poor neighbor-
hood. Cementing his conclusion was
the fact that employees at a nearby
brewery, which had its own pump, did
not contract cholera.
Learning about the daily lives of
these brewery workers led Snow to
theorize that cholera was transmitted
through contaminated drinking water.
To understand how a disease spread,
he was equally invested in the infected
and the uninfected.
As epidemiology evolved as a fi eld,
medical authorities continued to
consider the uninfected by developing
a new statistic: incidence rate or attack
rate, which is still used today. This
refers to the number of new infected
cases within a specifi c period measured
against the population. While epidemi-
ologists tabulate this rate, the media
does not typically broadcast it. Instead,
we are inundated with the crude
morbidity and mortality (infection and
death) rates.
In short, reporting the number of
infected offers a numerator but we are
missing the denominator. We need a
clearer empirical accounting.
A recent example shows why the
missing denominator is important: This
past summer, the media jumped on one
of the fi rst major outbreaks of break-
through cases in Provincetown, Mass.
This provided epidemiologists with
valuable evidence of how the delta vari-
ant infected many vaccinated people
— but no one actually counted the
number of people who were exposed
but not infected. (To be fair, document-
ing exposure among uninfected people
is more challenging than counting sick
people, as is fi nding infection among
asymptomatic people.)
By focusing on the vaccinated who
became infected, the media inadver-
tently gave the impression that the
delta variant had superpowers. If it is
super, it also has a weakness: the vac-
cines. That’s the picture that emerges
if one counts the uninfected and looks
at vaccination rates. A narrower focus
risks overplaying the danger of the
variant and underplaying the value of
the vaccines. Epidemiology needs to re-
member its roots and school the public.
The fi rst generation of epidemiolo-
gists were fi rst and foremost storytell-
ers. Without complicated modeling, or
much by way of accurate aggregate
data, narrating epidemics was at the
center of the fi eld, as historian Jacob
Steere-Williams explains. Reclaim-
ing this tradition and telling a more
complete and nuanced narrative of
COVID-19 — using modern data
science as well — can help us better
understand the virus and make better
choices, such as getting vaccinated.
By focusing only on a rising tide of
infections and deaths, we veil more of
the pandemic than we reveal.
Jim Downs, Gilder Lehrman-NEH
professor of history at Gettysburg
College, is the author of “Maladies of
Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery and
War Transformed Medicine.”