COVID-19 Response and Recovery Task Force: New Notice & a Question

From an email yesterday evening:

Dear Bruin Community:

As we prepare for the holiday closure, it is important for you to know about some upcoming changes and requirements that will take effect upon your return to work in the new year.

In order to implement Assembly Bill 685, which added Section 6409.6 to the California Labor Code and California Code of Regulations, Title 8, Section 3205. COVID-19 Prevention, effective January 1, 2021, all California employers must provide notice to their employees, exclusive union representatives, and employers of subcontracted employees of potential exposure to COVID-19 in the workplace. These notices must be issued within one business day of the potential exposure and contain specific information including location and dates during which the potential COVID-19 exposure occurred.

To share this information, UCLA has launched a new COVID-19 case location dashboard (UCLA logon ID required). The dashboard will be updated daily to include a list of COVID-19 cases at UCLA facilities within the past 14 days, the dates the infected individuals were on UCLA property during the infectious period and the buildings they visited during that timeframe. If you are working, learning or living on UCLA property, please bookmark the site and check it daily.

We will also send email notifications about these potential exposures to those individuals working, learning or living at UCLA facilities.

Please note that this dashboard and notifications are separate from UCLA contact tracing, which remains unchanged. There is no need to contact the COVID-19 Call Center after receiving these AB 685 email notifications. Anyone considered to be a close contact of a positive case (as defined by the L.A. County Department of Public Health) will be directly contacted by the UCLA Exposure Management Team and provided appropriate instructions.

What to Expect Under these Changes:

Whenever UCLA receives notice of a COVID-19 positive case occurring on site, the new case location dashboard will be updated and an email will be sent to either all those who worked at UCLA facilities on the relevant dates or only to those who worked in the same specific location(s), if that information is available. This location information will be pulled from symptom monitoring survey responses received that day, which asks which buildings an employee will be visiting while on UCLA premises. These email notifications will be sent to both campus and UCLA Health employees.

Importantly, AB 685 requires UCLA to provide notice to all unions of any employee (including those not represented by a union) who tested positive for COVID-19 and who worked at UCLA facilities, and to provide the name, job title, date of onset of illness and location of the worksite. Any employee who does not want their identity to be disclosed in this notification must request anonymity in response to the question that will appear in the Symptom Monitoring Survey beginning January 1. If you do not select anonymity, your name and job title will be disclosed to the unions if you test positive for the virus.

Confidentiality of personally identifiable information is provided for in AB 685, which prevents disclosure of personally identifiable employee information in a public records or similar request. It also prohibits disclosure of the information on a website or to any other state or federal agency. However, it mandates the disclosure to UCLA union representatives unless the employee specifically indicates they do not want their information shared.

Thank you again for your attention to protocols and procedures available at Bruins Safe Online. In addition to symptomatic testing, the UCLA Community Screening Program continues to help us identify cases early through asymptomatic testing. To ensure all cases are tracked properly, please remember to review and follow UCLA’s Standard Operating Procedure for Responding to COVID-19 Cases on the UCLA Campus (PDF) to report any additional cases on campus that are discovered outside the screening program.

As always, additional helpful information is available on the UCLA COVID-19 website and you can email covid19@ucla.edu with any questions.

I hope you have a safe and restful holiday closure.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Beck

Administrative Vice Chancellor

Co-chair, COVID-19 Response and Recovery Task Force

Michael Meranze

Immediate Past Chair, Academic Senate

Professor of History

Co-chair, COVID-19 Response and Recovery Task Force

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Note: It is not clear what someone is supposed to do with the information on the dashboard. The most recent page is listed below. Lots of folks will have visited, for example, 200 Medical Plaza or the Santa Monica Medical Center on the dates listed. Is everyone who was in the building on those dates supposed to quarantine? Clearly, not. Under that interpretation, the Santa Monica Medical Center and all the medical offices in 200 Medical Plaza would be out of business.