California Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said Friday the state’s coronavirus pandemic is improving and the downward trends are real, despite a technical glitch in the data-reporting system that caused a lag in collecting test information for days.
Ghaly noted that hospitalizations and ICUs continue to drop, and these are independent of the broken computer reporting system.
“We do feel confident in the trend and believe the trend has been stabilizing and coming down,” said the state’s top health official at a press briefing. “The hospital and death data is collected and reported in a different manner.”
The data issue has been fixed, but created a backlog of 250,000 to 300,000 records that Ghaly said will be processed in the next 24 to 48 hours.
“Those are test results,” he said. “We don’t know how many are positive or how many are negative.”
He said some of those records could be from lab tests for other illnesses, though he suspects the majority are COVID-19 test results. What’s more, the records will go through a process to eliminate any duplicates.
The state will be sorting records through the weekend and sharing new information with the public as it becomes available.
“Addressing this has been our top priority over the last 72 hours,” said Ghaly.
FILE – In this April 1, 2020, file photo Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California Health and Human Services, gestures to a chart showing the impact of the mandatory stay-at-home orders, during a news conference in Rancho Cordova, Calif.
Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressAt the start of the week on Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state had seen a 21.2% drop in the seven-day infection rate from the week before.
The next day, the governor’s statement was brought into question. Ghaly announced in his Tuesday press briefing the state hadn’t received complete reports of the number of tests conducted for days, nor the number that came back positive for COVID-19. In other words, the state didn’t have a clear idea of whether cases were going up or down. The data glitch didn’t impact the reporting of hospitalizations and deaths, however.
Ghaly said Friday that he was was made aware of the technical glitch that likely started with a computer server outage in July on Monday evening, and he alerted the public on Tuesday.
The California Reportable Disease Information Exchange (CalREDIE) is where the data breakdown occurred. The state system electronically receives COVID-19 test data from individual labs and feeds information from labs to both the state’s system and the local public health system.
“The CalREDIE system was not built for this volume of data,” said Ghaly, adding that new protocols are being put in place to ensure server capacity and redundant systems. The state has also built a redundant system to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again.
In addition to the data glitch, Ghaly said Friday the state “failed to renew a certificate” which kept one of the largest labs from reporting any test results for five days, from July 31 to Aug. 4.
This week amid the technical fiasco, many counties individually reported to the state that it thinks the coronavirus case numbers are being underreported or delayed. Cases in Sonoma County, for example, may be underreported by up to one-third, according to the Press Democrat.
What’s more, the state stopped adding and removing counties to and from the watch list this week. Ghaly said the watch list was frozen last Friday due to a change in the federal hospitalization metric standard, not the data glitch.
“We are working to assess the impact of the data issues on disease transmission metrics in the county data monitoring program and will get it back up and running as soon as possible,” CDPH said in a statement Thursday.
The state set up the watch list to create a system for monitoring counties that experience significant increases in COVID-19 infection and hospitalization rates. There are currently 38 of the state’s 58 counties on the list that are working with the state to identify the causes for any worrisome trends and next steps to mitigate the virus spread.
If a county is on a watch list for three days or longer, the state will order officials to roll back some reopenings. They also are not allowed to open school campuses until they have been off the watch list for at least 14 days.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Amy Graff is the news editor for SFGATE. Email her: agraff@sfgate.com.
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