PA Headlines 5/24/21
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — AP is reporting…Pennsylvania is firing a company that performed COVID-19 contact tracing and exposed the private medical information of tens of thousands of residents, state officials said Thursday. Employees of Insight Global used unauthorized Google accounts — readily viewable online — to store names, phone numbers, email addresses, COVID-19 exposure status, sexual orientations and other information about residents who had been reached for contact tracing.
The company’s contract with the state required it safeguard people’s data. The Department of Health said last month that at least 72,000 people were impacted. The state had planned to drop Insight Global once its contract expires at the end of the July, but the Health Department said Thursday it will terminate the contract early, on June 19. The department said that it was taking action “after more fully evaluating the circumstances” of the security lapse.
Insight Global is required to notify impacted people, and the Health Department said those notifications would begin next week. The department said the state’s contact tracing operation would continue with a new vendor. “We are working to make sure that there is not a break in continuity in our contact tracing services as we transition out of the Insight Global contract and into our next contract,” Acting Health Secretary Alison Beam said at a news briefing Thursday.
State Rep. Jason Ortitay, R-Allegheny, who has accused the Wolf administration of being slow to act on the breach, said in a statement that he is pleased the state is severing ties with the Atlanta-based company, but that he still wants answers about the incident. “This deserves a full investigation so we can learn what happened and how to prevent it from happening again moving forward,” he said. Both Insight Global and the Health Department are facing litigation over the breach.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — AP is reporting…With voters shifting major new responsibilities to them, Pennsylvania’s state lawmakers are now tasked with deciding whether hundreds of state government regulations waived during the COVID-19 pandemic should be reinstated. This massive review is fueled by Tuesday’s referendum in which voters became the first in the nation to curb their governor’s emergency powers, approving constitutional amendments that will give lawmakers much more power over disaster declarations.
A key component of a disaster declaration is a governor’s authority to waive a regulation, and one waived regulation that Republicans want restored is the work-search requirements for people claiming unemployment benefits. Thursday, Gov. Tom Wolf renewed the disaster declaration, his fifth straight in response to the coronavirus. If the provisions of the constitutional amendments approved Tuesday apply to it, Wolf’s new disaster declaration will expire in three weeks.
Before Tuesday, an emergency declaration by a governor could last for up to 90 days and be extended without limit. That could leave lawmakers in charge of deciding whether to extend the whole declaration past its expiration on June 9, including the work-search requirement. “The decision that we face now is, ‘do we extend and renew the disaster declaration in whole, in part or not at all,’” said Jason Gottesman, a spokesperson for House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, R-Centre.
