Twitter COVID exposure trackers show need for more data transparency in B.C., expert says

As the COVID-19 pandemic has dragged on in British Columbia, so too have requests for more public health information from the province.

B.C.'s health leaders have been criticized for withholding information on the spread of COVID-19, with the official line being that public case information would stigmatize individuals transmitting the coronavirus or communities experiencing outbreaks.

It's led to the rise of unofficial case trackers on platforms like Twitter, who argue they're helping tackle the provincial government's lack of transparency.

In particular, they point to the lack of official exposure notices in schools, a gap they're trying to fill on social media.

The student behind a Twitter COVID exposure tracker for the University of B.C. said their account wouldn't exist if the province and university officials had been more forthcoming with public health information.

"In an ideal world, [publicly posting COVID exposures] is something the university and provincial health authorities would be doing themselves," the student told CBC News. 

"They are far more qualified to do it. They have far better access to data, to information about transmission, to contact tracing capacity."

CBC News has agreed to keep the identity of the student confidential in order to protect their academic career.

The UBC COVID Tracker began in September 2021, at the start of the school year. Since then, the project has tracked dozens of exposures at the university.

Despite concerns that COVID-positive students wrote exams at the end of December, and numerous universities beginning the January term online, B.C. health officials continue to insist that in-person instruction is safe.

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has said the layers of protection in education settings prevent significant transmission. 

However, with exposures not made public due to privacy reasons, there is no quantitative data available to back up her claim.

For the student behind the tracker account, the lack of information from UBC — something they note is unlike many universities in North America, which have dedicated COVID-19 reporting tools — is connected to broader trends concerning transparency in the province.

"It does seem like, obviously, there's issues with this provincial government concerning transparency," the student said. "Whether it's COVID related, whether it's like the larger FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] issue that popped up a few months ago … obviously that trickles onto campus."

Lack of exposure data hinders scientists

The UBC COVID tracker relies on self-reporting from students and staff who have been sent internal exposure notices. 

It operates in a similar fashion to a tracker set up for K-12 schools, where parents email internal school exposures to the account and they're then posted publicly.

Jens von Bergmann, a data analyst at Mountain Math and member of an independent COVID-19 modelling group, said information around public exposures helps parents make risk assessments for their families.

"I think in B.C. there was a really big public need for information there that the province did not provide," he said. "These groups jumped in to fill that gap."

Public pressure partly fuelled by the K-12 tracker's popularity prompted the province to start posting school exposures publicly. But amid the pandemic's fifth wave, which has caused a record number of daily new COVID-19 cases, exposure notices were dropped again.

Von Bergmann said the province should start to proactively report COVID-19 outbreaks in schools, especially considering the coronavirus's current prevalence in the community and how the Twitter tracker can only capture a fraction of all exposures.

"We don't protect people from the flu the same way," he said. "If there's a measles outbreak in school, we declare it … there's a lot of information that we do give out already, and somehow we don't do the same thing with COVID."

He says the data collected by the school exposure tracker has been invaluable in producing analysis around the pandemic in B.C. — something becoming increasingly harder as the province restricts access to testing.

"It is good to have an independent voice or several independent voices to have sort of a broad understanding," he said. "It's not happening because we don't have the data."

Von Bergmann says the province should also begin to prioritize providing normalized wastewater data, start reporting positive rapid tests, and provide clarity on tests in private settings.