College enforces monitoring, health passport—imitating China
Students to report exposure to sick family members. Faculty to report suspected sick students. Data sent to county. Health Passport like China's initiated.
Note: Several links attached to quotes take the reader to the exact moment in the video when the quotes occurred.
NORWALK, CALIF. — Cerritos College has “encouraged” students to report their exposure to family members with Covid-19 while implementing a health passport similar to what the Chinese Communist Party uses.
“Our task force also recommends continuing with mandatory reporting for contact tracing purposes,” said Dr. Hillary Mennella, associate dean of Health and Wellness, at a May 21 online forum. “We encourage student responsibility to contact Student Health Services...to report either an exposure or their own positive (Covid-19) case.”
“An example of exposure would be someone that you live with,” said Mennella.
The college is also “asking” professors to report the Covid-19 status of their students to Student Health Services, even in online-only classes.
“If a faculty member learns that a student is positive and/or thinks they are positive, they should contact SHS as soon as possible,” said the college’s Return-to-Campus Plan. “SHS staff will retain a roster of students who are in quarantine and isolation, and work with the Los Angeles Public Health Department for contact tracing.”
It’s unclear what health information, if any, is being collected on students’ family members and everything being done with it. The Lakewood Populist specifically asked what information—including names, family/relationship status, phone numbers, and more—were being collected by the college. However, college staff declined to answer that question.
It’s also unclear whether the collected Covid-19 information of students, employees and anyone else could ever be expunged from the college’s and county’s records.
The college uses data to prohibit certain students from attending the taxpayer-funded, public institution via Cerritos College’s health passport app, OptimumHQ.
OptimumHQ mirrors the health passports used by totalitarian Beijing, per interviews with persons living in China and a review of posts on Chinese social media. This is alarming because the Chinese Communist Party, which rules the country, has murdered millions of its citizens.
The authoritarian party—commonly referred to as the CCP—so closely monitors people in Beijing that Chinese and expats living there literally whisper when criticizing the government. The author knows this information firsthand.
The Lakewood Populist has reviewed several hours of recorded-video footage from the college’s board meetings and online forums. The footage revealed the extreme power possessed by Student Health Services staff over students’ access to a publicly-funded education.
Whether this power of Student Health Services extends to what students do at home is unclear as the college’s staff, including Mennella, has declined to address several questions emailed to them regarding things said at public meetings. Phone messages also went unreturned.
Students exposed to the virus are asked about their vaccination status. It’s unclear why the college asks for this information.
“Vaccines will not be required for students to return to campus,” wrote Miya Walker, director of public affairs, in an email. “Vaccination status will not be used to determine whether or not a student can come to campus.”
However, it was unclear what if anything was being done to ensure the public that vaccination status wasn’t being used as part of the metrics for students’ return to campus once being exposed to someone with Covid-19.
California recently released guidelines allowing employees classified as exposed to someone with Covid-19 to return to work if they are fully vaccinated and display no symptoms. Those lacking full vaccination, however, must complete a quarantine period before returning to work.
Students are also being offered assistance if their families are against the Covid-19 vaccine.
“Maybe you live in a household where your entire family is against vaccination but you’re feeling like maybe, you know, you need to be vaccinated,” said Mennella at the April 27 online forum. “You can make a private Zoom appointment with one of our nurse practitioners and we would be happy to go through with you any of your concerns.”
Students were warned by college administrators that they face consequences if they don’t honestly and “appropriately” answer the daily online health questionnaire on OptimumHQ.
“We can hold you accountable under the Student Code of Conduct,” said Dr. Dilcie D. Perez at at an April 27 online forum. “Unfortunately, we had to hold one student accountable. … I felt bad for the student but it’s really, really important that when you’re answering those questions that you’re truthful and honest.”
Students were also warned of what could happen to them should they be classified as being positive with Covid-19.
“Some people are devastated that they have Covid, even if they’re not that ill. They’re very embarrassed about it. There’s some sort of a stigma and we want to help you with that,” Mennella said at an April 27 forum.
Faculty reporting students’ Covid-19 status
Student Health Services has worked with college employees in tracking students’ Covid-19 status.
“We developed a form for faculty on campus to fill out when they are notified by students that they have a positive case of Covid or have been exposed. And they send that information over to me,” said Mennella at the Feb. 17 board of trustees meeting.
The information collected on students by faculty members includes students’ symptoms, illnesses and correspondence with the professor. Mennella at the May 21 forum encouraged faculty to forward students’ emails to Student Health Services so she could examine it.
Online professors are also reporting their students’ Covid-19 status after students notified their professors when they had tested positive and fallen behind on class assignments, said Mennella at a May 5 board of trustees meeting.
“In this way we can guarantee that, you know, they don’t come to the library or study hall,” said Mennella at the May 21 forum about the effect of faculty reporting on students’ health.
Isolation and quarantining of students; lack of safeguards for civil rights
Once a student is classified by Student Health Services as being exposed to someone with Covid-19 or sick with the virus themselves, they are banned from returning to campus until Student Health Services classifies them as healthy.
“As soon as we find out that a student should not be on campus, we switch their OptimumHQ pre-screen survey to the red badge—so it says unhealthy—they are unable to access it to answer any questions and come on campus,” said Mennella at the Feb. 17 board of trustees meeting.
Mennella later explained how she was the one who would contact medical staff, vice presidents and faculty members to allow a student back onto campus.
It’s unclear what safeguards—if any—are being provided to protect students, faculty and college staff from being wrongly reported as unhealthy by those with bad intentions. For example, in a New York Times Notable Book, an author describes how during the Cultural Revolution people would harass each other in China via threatening to report on each other.
“The second daughter went downstairs and cut her own wrists with the scissors. She then rushed to a curious crowd outside the door, bloody hands raised high in the air. She shouted, ‘Look at me. I am a worker who was attacked by a bourgeois intellectual. Comrades, this is a political murder.’ Her family members came out. They shouted, ‘A debt of blood must be paid by blood.’ My father said we must move. We must escape,” wrote Anchee Min in part 1 of “Red Azalea”.
Outside of a negative Covid-19 test, it appears there’s no forum where which students could protest inappropriate or unnecessary classifications as unhealthy.
Once banned from campus, students complete a quarantine and isolation period, during which time Student Heath Services staff periodically contact them to check on their health.
“Students should provide SHS with documentation from an identifying ambulatory, hospital or public health agency indicating the need for mandated self-quarantine or isolation,” said the college’s Return-to-Campus Plan, emphasis mine (page 32).
The college in its Return-to-Campus Plan defines quarantining and isolation.
“As soon as they’ve met the guidelines to be released from either quarantine or isolation, we chart that and then I contact the faculty and the VPs and let them know that the student is cleared to return to campus,” said Mennella at the Feb. 17 board of trustees meeting.
Cerritos College staff declined to answer a question on what kind of isolation Mennella was referring to, as well as to whether quarantining related to something beyond a student being temporarily banned from campus.
It’s unclear whether the college will reprimand quarantined and isolated students for not staying in their homes and away from other students off-campus. Language in the college’s Standards of Student Conduct implies that the college may hold power over students’ off-campus conduct in regards to isolation and quarantining.
”The following conduct shall constitute good cause for discipline...when the conduct threatens the safety or security of the campus community whether or not the location is associated with the District,” according to the Standards of Student Conduct, first page.
The standards were last revised June 2.
CCP health passports similar to OptimumHQ
When returning home in Beijing, an expat was surprised to find a long line of cars.
“They are stopping every single vehicle even police cars too,” the person wrote on WeChat in January, “need to get in line for registration with covid test report and scan code on wechat.” (SIC)
WeChat is the most popular social media app for the 1.4 billion people living in China. It’s well known that it’s heavily monitored by the government searching for dissidents, and many a Chinese and expat have found ways to use coded language to bypass the censors.
“Yes, every single vehicle, zero tolerance,” the person wrote, responding to a question about the delay, “we waited there about 1 hour outside standing in line.”
Eventually, the person got cleared to enter the city and go home, but not everyone was so lucky.
“This guy can’t enter. Because he traveled to Shijianzhuang in last month,” the person wrote regarding a Chinese man who stood in front of this person in line.
What allowed the expat to get inside Beijing and what stopped the Chinese man from entering the city were two things: contact tracing and a green-coded health passport on a cell phone.
When Mennella says that students are asked about where they’ve travelled for determining whether they can return to campus, one has to wonder: What’s the difference between Cerritos College’s Covid-19 protocol and the CCP’s tyranny?
People living across China need to upload their health information onto electronic apps on their cell phones so they can travel and buy food to eat, according to persons living in China.
You show the health code app, which can sometimes be uploaded to your phone via a QR code at shopping centers, to the guards standing outside shopping centers. If it’s green, you get to go inside and buy food. If it’s red, you’re told to leave hungry and go home.
“As soon as we find out that a student should not be on campus, we switch their OptimumHQ pre-screen survey to the red badge—so it says unhealthy—so they’re unable to access it to answer any questions and come on campus,” said Mennella at the Feb. 17 Cerritos College board of trustees meeting.
The problem with the CCP’s authoritarian system is that it’s open to rampant abuse. Just look at how African expats were thrown onto the streets during the height of the Covid-19 panic in China in 2020. Authorities were targeting expats with forced testing and quarantining, the Los Angeles Times reported.
One of the ways to get the CCP health passport to turn from red to green is by getting your negative Covid-19 test.
“We can go into a little more detail as to how we have done some of the contact tracing and some of the identification of who needs to be quarantined...and then allowed to return once they’ve produced a negative test result,” said Cerritos College President Jose Fierro at the March 3 board of trustees meeting.
Not everyone in China has the vaccine and so it’s difficult to implement a vaccine passport even for the authoritarian CCP. A recent, unofficial poll by The Beijinger—the go-to source for news for many expats living in Beijing—reported only 80 percent of expats as having received the vaccine shot, while only 13 million out of Beijing’s 21.5 million residents have received the shot.
As a result, tyrannical Beijing doesn’t have an electronic vaccine passport but rather an electronic health passport, which is exactly what “free” Cerritos College has as well.
What’s interesting is that the CCP has allowed its citizens to go without any Covid-19 restrictions at all. Pictures from the 2020 New Year’s Eve celebration in Wuhan, where the virus originated, showed thousands of people without masks, partying shoulder-to-shoulder.
Videos and pictures from bars, clubs and concerts in China from summer 2020 to now also show Chinese and expats getting together like there is nothing wrong. And, according to The Beijinger, nothing is wrong.
“It’s been 132 days since the last local virus transmission in Beijing. Two imported cases were reported, one confirmed, one asymptomatic,” wrote publisher Mike Wester on Friday, Beijing time.
So, why the overarching control in Beijing? And, for that matter, why this panic-driven health passport and communist-styled monitoring at Cerritos College when even President Fierro admits in a meeting that people are hanging out in public?
Going by China’s example, which Cerritos College appears to be following, even a near total eradication of this virus won’t initiate a government pullback of its monitoring and temporarily banning of people.
This begs the question, Will the absolutism ever end, both in Beijing and at Cerritos College? And, if it doesn’t end, what—if anything—will prevent Cerritos College officials from racially and ideologically targeting people like they already do in authoritarian China under the veneer of safety?
This is why the collection of all this health data being sent to the county government is so alarming. This is why the warning about a stigma is so unsettling. And this is why the people—not our elected officials and certainly not unelected medical and collegiate officials—need to decide if this is the society they want to live under.
Editor’s Note: The article was updated with detailed information about how Cerritos College staff declined to answer what kind of information was being collected about persons with Covid-19, including family members, that students were exposed to.