Answer: What's the latest regulation about COVID-19?

Finding the latest information about COVID-19 is sometimes tricky. Here's why...     

As you might recall, last week I was planning on visiting a friend's house for a very small outdoor garden dinner party.  But there was a concern about following the latest COVID-19 social distancing directions.  

Monet's Lunch on the grass - Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. My aspirational picnic. 

Is it true that, as of today, one should NOT meet in a friend's backyard for a barbecue?  Seems odd. 

Nevertheless, I thought I'd spend a few minutes and see if I could find the relevant state regulation.     

I did the obvious searches and spent about 15 minutes searching around, but failed!  What?  

This led to the Challenge for this week:  

1.  Can you find the local--and CURRENT--COVID regulations about what is permissible behavior in your town/city/county/state?  Once you've found them, what was your strategy?  

This is clearly news you can use in our time of COVID. 

Let me tell you what didn't work!  I did searches that were variations on: 

     [ latest regulations COVID-19 ] 

 But this was unsatisfactory for many reasons. Oh, I found lots of results, but "latest regulation" (or rules, or guidelines) appears on ALL of the regulation documents.  Bottom line here: a search term like "latest" is almost totally useless.  All of those press reports will say "latest" or "current," but they're not the "most recent" with respect to my search... I need a different way to search for that content.  

What I eventually realized is that I needed to find the authority that is issuing guidance for where I lived.  What would that be?  

After reading a lot of announcements and news reports, I finally figured out that ALL of the official guidance were all issued by someone in authority.  That is SOMEONE issued (and signed) the notice.  

This changes my Challenge to ... who is the authority for my city/county/state/country?  

 Once I know who that person is, then we can do a more targeted search.  My next search was:  

     [ health officer City of Palo Alto ] 

And quickly found out that the position is called "health director" at the city level, and "health officer" at the county level.  (I suspect that's not standard, but rather just local traditions.)  But it means that we need to broaden our search.  Next I tried: 

     [ health director City of Palo Alto ]  

Which got me to the

     [ health director  County of Santa Clara ] 

tells us that this is Sara Cody.  We can triangulate the Santa Clara directive by looking for: 

     [ Sara Cody Santa Clara COVID-19
          directive OR regulations] 

This is pretty good--lots of results that are relevant.  

HOWEVER... the results are from the past 3 months.  If you read them all, they're contradictory in the aggregate; the regulations keep changing over time.  

But we can filter the results by time.  Like this:  

Filter your results by clicking on Tools then click on Any Time and select
your appropriate time segment.  (I'm going to use "Past week")  

Once you're restricted your results to the past week, the search problem becomes much easier.   (You might have to use "Past month" or a custom range, depending on how often the results change.)  

In my case, using the name of the Health Director for the County worked well.  

That finds us the relevant county-wide regulations.  If we apply to same strategy to the state (California, in my case), we learn that the Health Officer (note the change in terminology) for California is  Sonia Y Angell, MD.  Following our pattern from before:  

     [ Sonia Y. Angell California COVID-19
         coronavirus directive OR regulations ] 

and then limiting the results to the past few days or weeks finds us all of the relevant documents.  

Another, similar approach is to look for the agency that's issuing the guidance.  In California's case, the agency that Sonia Y. Angell runs is the California Department of Public Health within the  State of California's Health and Human Services Agency.  Searching for the agency name also gives great results:  

     [ California Department of Public Health
          COVID-19 coronavirus directive
          OR regulations ] 

For this query, the first result is the Public Health Orders for COVID-19, which covers exactly what we're looking for.  In there it says:  

Example 1: A family hosts a birthday party in the backyard of their house. The backyard is only big enough to allow 15 people to easily maintain 6-foot social distancing between households at all times. No more than 15 people may be present at the party.

This guidance is dated July 20, which was the day-of our backyard barbecue, so it seems to cover my question pretty precisely.   We had 4 people in a yard that could easily contain 15 people at a 6-foot radius, so I think we're pretty good.  

Alas, a similar strategy does NOT work for the entire country.  It's easy to find the Surgeon General of the US (Jerome Adams), but it's difficult to find any definitive directions (let alone regulations or directives) from the chief medical officer of the United States.  That's not a failure of searching, but a failure of communication.  

As far as I can tell, unlike many other countries, the US does not have any federal mandates about social gatherings of the kind that motivated this Challenge.  

But it brings up an interesting point:  Determining that something is NOT there is really difficult. 

I wish I had a definitive strategy for you, but this is the eternal problem of research, it's often impossible to know that something does NOT exist.  (You can show that something doesn't exist in a closed collection, but in this case, showing that the relevant authority has not yet posted a regulation is really difficult.  All you can do is to show "show your work," telling us what you searched for, and you didn't.)  

Search Lessons 

1. Time filtering lets you find current content.  In the case of regulations and late-breaking information about pandemics, you certainly want to see the most current material. Be sure you know how to filter by "past 24 hours"  "last month" or even better, "custom range."  

2.  Sometimes a person-centered (or organization-centered) approach is best.  That is, when searching for official documents from government agencies, they're nearly always signed by the relevant person (the official in charge) or the relevant agency is listed on the document.  

Denouement  

I tracked down the author of the original article in our local newspaper, the one that warned about not being able to have a backyard barbecue.  The journalist was kind enough to tell me that her source was the Assistant Santa Clara County Counsel who spoke during a county supervisor's public town hall meeting.  It seems that the Counsel was talking about the Santa Clara County Directive (which was, oddly enough, issued by Santa Clara County Emergency Operations Center, but echoes the state-wide directive issued a week earlier).  In any case, neither the County nor State directives explicitly forbid backyard dining, but they do give guidance about number of guests and size, as you see above.  

After all that, I determined that I was, according to the directives, completely within bounds.  

It was a wonderful dinner outside, under the trees... 

Search on!