Transparency is one of those buzzy kind of words that seem to cluster like flies around government and other like organizations.
What is so great about transparency?
Maybe we should just call it what it is. Honesty.
Transparency is a lack of secrecy. It is opening the door and inviting people into a process. It takes everything out of the big black box and lays it out on a table for everyone to see.
And that is what we need. Within reason, of course.
We don’t need to know someone’s birthday and blood type. We do need to know who hired someone and for how much. We need to know what the steps were in deciding to go with this contractor over that one, and how a school district opted for one curriculum over another.
Because they are our decisions, too.
In a dictatorship or an empire, a leader makes a decision and it is implemented. In a representative government like ours, the decision-makers don’t choose for us. We choose them with the understanding that the fiscal hawk we picked won’t go on a spending spree or the tough-on-crime guy will clean this place up. Transparency is how we know that’s happening.
It might seem like that is less important in a time of crisis, like war or natural disaster or a pandemic. It is not.
In emergencies, we need to trust our leaders and our government more than ever because of the rapid nature of the decisions being made and their broad impact. But that makes it all the more important to be able to follow the breadcrumbs of the decision-making.
So Pennsylvanians need to know all the same things that people in Ohio and Maryland and other states know about the process of testing and handling coronavirus.
The state Department of Health updates the numbers of positive tests and lets us know what counties have confirmed and presumed cases. They have not kept track of the number who have presented with symptoms or exposure and been sent home rather than being tested. Scratch that. They have not released that number.
The rationale is privacy. We applaud privacy. But we reject the idea that telling us how many people have been told to self-quarantine or who are being monitored would violate that.
For every person stocking up on quarantine supplies, there is someone who isn’t restricting their activities because they believe the pandemic is a panic with no reason. Releasing accurate information about the number of people who, like 412 Food Rescue senior program director Jennifer England, are keeping themselves under wraps for the public good, could help people better understand the situation and make them more attentive to precautions.
Transparency is honesty. Without honesty, there is no trust. We all need to be able to trust the information right now.
