California Virus Cases Underreported, Health Official Says

Speaker 1: 00:00 Governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, announced some good news, a significant drop in people, testing positive for COVID-19. The very next day we learned of a data snafu that puts those numbers and COVID test numbers across the state into question the problem stems from an unexplained breakdown in an electronic system that transfers test results into a statewide disease registry. The unreliable data has left public health officials unable to gauge how the disease is progressing. San Diego County supervisor Nathan Fletcher says positive test numbers from the County and local lab testing are accurate, but commercial labs communicate directly to the state. Speaker 2: 00:42 There has been a breakdown in that reporting system at the state they're working to rectify it. Our team has been in contact with the state and are determining, uh, how many tests were missing and over what timeframe Speaker 1: 00:53 To discuss. What we know about the problem with the state's data system is Anita [inaudible] state politics and policy reporter for the Los Angeles times. Anita, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on Maureen. How does this data reporting system usually work? And how long has it been broken? The way it usually works is that commercial labs just automatically send their test results in. So this is really just a tabulation it's account every day at a certain point, every lab that has test results, just shoots those over to the state department of public health and they add them all together. We don't know exactly what is wrong. The state either doesn't know itself or is deciding not to give us that information. We're not quite sure yet, but what we do know is that for at least about a week, perhaps longer, we don't know how long at least some of those labs, their results have not been added into the overall count. Speaker 1: 01:50 We don't know how many, or if it's a certain part of the state or statewide, we're really a little bit in the dark about exactly what this glitch means overall, how the state and public health officials rely on this data to make decisions about COVID response. It's one data point. So we do have other reliable data sets such as our hospitalization and ICU rates. Those things are not affected those come from a different source, but where the positivity numbers of tests come in a one, it lets us know how prevalent it is in our state and in various locations. And two it's an earlier marker of what we can expect in our hospitals. So where that number plays in is one what's open and what's not right. If there's a ton of positives, it keeps those restrictions in place. But if there's a ton of positives, it also tells us that we can two to three weeks from now expect our hospitals to be hit. Speaker 1: 02:49 And if we're not prepping for our hospitals to be hit in two or three weeks, because we don't know that can really impact whether we can handle them in our hospitals, whether we have the ICU beds, whether we have the medications, whether we have the staffing, it is used to determine which counties are and remain on the state watch list as well. Now counties have said, this will also impact contact tracing. How does that work? Well, if you don't know, who's positive, you can't trace their contacts. So right now the County is not getting the information about who is positive with these missing test results. And so they're not being traced. So we have no idea, you know, do you have 10 people out there that are infected and we're not tracing? Or do you have a hundred or do you have a thousand? We just don't know how many people are involved in this glitch. Speaker 1: 03:39 And so really contact tracing is stopped for all of them. It just doesn't exist. If you don't have the test results, you said that this data glitch doesn't affect what we know about hospitalizations or deaths in the state. What are those numbers telling us about the virus now? So our numbers of hospitalizations and deaths have actually stabilized a little bit, which is good news. We're not sure if it's a plateau or a decline. The experts I've spoken to said, they believe that overall in the state that that plateau will hold, but there's parts of the state such as the central Valley, where we're just seeing steep, steep rises in these cases. And so those hotspots are going to continue to be of real concern. Our state parks, public health officials, telling laboratories maybe to not report to the registry, but to, to report directly to the counties. Speaker 1: 04:36 Some County health officials are trying to gather those results on their own are asking labs to report directly to them and, and trying to find those types of workarounds. But that's a real, uh, burden of labor that they weren't expecting. And it's kind of an ad hoc on the fly system to try to get a handle on this. Really. We need Cal ready, fixed before we'll have a clear picture of what's happening again, calibrating, which is the state disease registry that all that information is supposed to go into. So now you've reported that one of the main concerns is the impact. This data glitch may have on public trust, about what officials say about the virus. Absolutely. I mean, I think all of us are far more interested in, in case counts than we ever thought we would be. Right. We, we all want to know what's happening in the state to get an insight into our own lives and to when our kids might return to school into when our businesses might reopen. Speaker 1: 05:33 And when you have a data glitch like this, I think it, it really throws people psychologically, all of a sudden, none of us know where we're really at. And I think that's very difficult. And so when I spoke to experts yesterday, that was one of their concerns. Well, if this glitch it exists, what other glitches do we not know about? How do we have faith in data when we're finding out that that data flawed? And so I think that that's something that the state really has to consider is how do they instill that faith in people that what they're telling them is accurate. Any estimate as to when this state registry data will be fixed? No, my, my understanding is, is that as of now, there isn't a hard date, although they are working on it. I've been speaking with Anita [inaudible] state politics and policy reporter for the Los Angeles times. And Anita, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on Marine Speaker 3: 06:32 [inaudible].