California governor seeks investigation into coronavirus data disaster

Gov. Gavin Newsom has directed an investigation into a series of errors that led to a backlog of up to 300,000 lab records in the state’s coronavirus reporting system, a top health official said Friday.

California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly broke the state’s silence surrounding the system’s persistent technical problems Friday with an overview of what led to the massive backup, which has left counties in limbo as they relied on old-fashioned spreadsheets to try to track the virus locally.

“Our data system failed, and that led to inaccuracy in case numbers and test positivity rates,” Ghaly acknowledged.

The trouble began July 25th when a server outage created a delay in records entering the state’s case tracking system, the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange, or CalREDIE, Ghaly said. The state put temporary technical changes in place to allow records to flow in more quickly — but the changes were not disabled, which led to an overload and subsequent backlog.

Simultaneously, Ghaly said, officials discovered that the state had failed to renew a two-year certificate to receive test data from Quest, one of the nation’s largest commercial labs. The state did not receive any lab reports from Quest for about five days in the beginning of August while the certificate was expired.

Newsom has since directed an internal investigation into the events, Ghaly said.

In total, the two problems affected 250,000 to 300,000 records. That includes results for communicable diseases other than COVID-19 that are fed into the CalREDIE system and some records may also be duplicates. It’s not clear how many of those records are coronavirus tests or the extent to which positive results have been underreported in recent days.

Officials have since made server upgrades and put in place a secondary system to validate the data in lab reports, Ghaly said. In the longer term, the state is developing another data collection system that will surpass CalREDIE’s capacity.

Ghaly said the state will process the missing reports in full over the next two days, but it will take longer for counties to sort through the data in their local dashboards.

When asked to comment on the lag between when counties were notified on July 25th and when Ghaly himself became aware days later on Monday, Ghaly said that “we are aware that some individuals were knowledgeable of some of these challenges.

“We’re doing a complete look into how that communication could have been better and where it went wrong,” Ghaly said, adding, “We will hold people accountable.”

Still, Ghaly said he was confident after a review of the past month’s data and some June results that the problem does not go back earlier than July 25th, as some local officials had believed. Santa Clara County CEO Jeff Smith told this news organization Thursday that the health department noticed problems as early as July 16; Ghaly said that earlier delays were temporary and unrelated to the July 25th outage.

Various counties — including Santa Cruz, Ventura, Stanislaus and Kings counties — stopped reporting case numbers this week, citing the data problems. San Francisco officials also said they would stop until a solution is underway.