SAN JOSE — Santa Clara County recorded more than 250 workplace coronavirus outbreaks in 2020 and 2021, new data shows, giving the most comprehensive picture to date of how the virus spread through essential businesses during the peak months of the pandemic.
The outbreaks impacted almost every sector, including retailers and grocery stores, restaurants, construction sites, manufacturing and food processing plants, warehouses, and public agencies like the California Highway Patrol, Cal Fire, the city of San Jose, the San Jose Police Department and the Valley Transportation Authority.
The records, which the county provided in response to a public records request from the Bay Area News Group, show the virus’s prevalence in the Bay Area’s largest county, and underscore its disproportionate impact on essential workers who were not able to stay home as the pandemic tore through communities.
Overall, the county recorded 264 outbreaks — defined as three cases in a single location in a two-week period — between June 2020 and April 2021, including 68 outbreaks at retail and grocery stores; 45 outbreaks at construction sites; and 49 outbreaks at factories and other manufacturing facilities — including 51 cases at an Olympus America site, the largest outbreak recorded by the county.
The data illustrate how the virus tended to spread between vulnerable community members who both lived and worked together, said Dr. George Han, the county’s deputy public health officer.
“Generally, we would expect outbreaks to occur in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces,” Han said. “Our data are consistent with the medical literature and public health literature. … We are not unique in our pattern.”
Though Santa Clara County has required employers to report COVID-19 cases since last June, details about workplace outbreaks in the county have not been made public until now. The records do not include case numbers for outbreaks affecting fewer than 11 people. They also do not include outbreaks at schools and universities, or in congregate living settings like prisons and nursing homes.
The county provided the data to this news organization in late June, more than two months after a public records request for the information, and following the publication of an investigation detailing how the state and many local health departments have declined to make workplace outbreak data public despite a law aimed at increasing transparency around those outbreaks.
Under that law, AB 685, Bay Area News Group requested workplace outbreak data from all 58 counties and the three cities with their own local health departments. So far, 22 have provided responsive records; four have claimed they have had no outbreaks, and five have requested additional time to respond.
Seventeen counties flatly declined to provide records, arguing without evidence that naming employers who have reported outbreaks risks individual employees being identified. Twelve did not respond despite numerous reminders. (San Bernardino County did not receive the initial request, and has said it is currently locating records.)
When asked why Santa Clara County did not make workplace outbreak data public, County Executive Jeff Smith said he had believed employers would alert workers to infections without external pressure.
“We thought notifying their employees was being taken care of by the employer, so we focused on notifying the public when we thought it was clear there was a specific reason why a particular business was at higher risk than normal,” Smith said.
“I’m not saying it was logical,” he added. “We were too trusting.”
Smith said the county is now planning to put the data on its website.
What the records show
The records confirm the impact of COVID-19 on the county’s public-facing workers, particularly those at grocery and retail stores. Costco, for example, reported 11 outbreaks at its locations in Santa Clara County, while Target reported eight.
In a brief statement, a Target spokesperson confirmed that workers had tested positive in the San Jose area, “though not in numbers significantly different from other parts of the country at that time.” Costco did not respond to a request for comment.
The county also recorded at least two large outbreaks at warehouse and delivery companies, with UPS and FedEx reporting 42 and 33 cases, respectively, at their San Jose facilities this winter.
A FedEx spokesperson said their “records do not align” with the county data, but declined to explain how. UPS did not respond to a request for comment. Olympus America, which recorded the largest outbreak in the county, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Construction was also among the industries hardest hit by COVID outbreaks, mirroring what public health experts said has been a national trend. For example, more than 32 cases were reported at three Google construction sites in Mountain View and Sunnyvale; 19 cases were reported at a site constructing multifamily housing units in Milpitas.
Gary Filizetti, president of Devcon Construction, the contractor for one of the Mountain view sites and the Sunnyvale site, said that positive cases turned up after workers got their temperatures checked arriving at work and were told to go home and get tested. Although some may have commuted together, Filizetti said there was no further spread among the hundreds of workers at either project.
“That’s why we set up the testing protocol, so people would have a safe environment to work in,” he said. “We feel socially responsible.”
The construction sector was one of the first to reopen following the Bay Area’s initial shelter-in-place order last spring; following intense lobbying by the industry, Santa Clara County allowed most construction work to resume amid its very first reopening. Based on the number of outbreaks that have occurred at construction sites since then, Smith said, “it would have been better if we had kept construction closed for a longer period of time.”
Epidemiologist Dr. John Swartzberg, professor emeritus with the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program who reviewed the county’s data, said that the pattern across industries “makes complete sense” given national trends. A recent UC San Francisco study confirmed that certain California industries — including food and agriculture, transportation and logistics, and manufacturing — were associated with excess mortality rates among workers during the pandemic.
“Someone at a cash register sees God knows how many people in a given day,” Swartzberg said. “The commonality is lower-paying jobs combined with lots of contact with the public, so you have continuous risk.”
Jim Araby, director of strategic campaigns for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5, suspects that even Santa Clara County’s records likely undercount the impact of the virus on grocery, food service and warehouse employees, adding that he was informed by employers directly of outbreaks at other locations that are not on the county’s list.
“If we’d had a more comprehensive set of data points, we could have made a stronger argument to say, ‘We need to do more rigorous enforcement of agreed-upon standards,’” Araby said. “We had hundreds of workers across the nation die.”
Information about workplace outbreaks, he said, should have informed health policy decisions earlier and more transparently.
“You can’t combat a public health crisis if you don’t know where it’s happening,” Araby said. “If the variant comes along, and we don’t have the correct data and information on what happened last time, how are we going to have a response that’s any different?”
Santa Clara County’s workplace outbreak data is available here.