The accuracy of California’s downward coronavirus case trend was thrown into question Wednesday as health officials scrambled to fix persistent technical problems in the state reporting system, stymieing local officials and prompting questions surrounding policy decisions regarding reopening plans.
Ongoing glitches with the state’s coronavirus tracking database, CalREDIE, have resulted in tests — and cases — going unreported, health officials said this week. Worse yet, officials weren’t sure of the scope of the problems with the data, which is used to track California’s battle with the pandemic and inform decisions about when — and whether — individual counties can resume reopenings.
Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody said in a Wednesday briefing that the data lag makes it impossible to discern which direction the county has trended for several weeks.
“We just don’t know,” Cody said. “We don’t know if our cases are rising, plateauing or decreasing. We are very anxious for this issue to get resolved. We expect all of these numbers will go up. To what extent — we don’t know.”
Other Bay Area counties, including Contra Costa and San Mateo, posted notes on their public COVID-19 data dashboards expressing frustration with the inaccuracies. Without accurate data — nor an understanding of the issue’s scope or the state’s timeline for fixing it — local health officials will struggle to adequately investigate and trace cases, San Mateo officials wrote.
Kate Folmar, a spokesperson for California Health and Human Services Agency, did not reply to detailed questions from this news organization about the extent of the problems with CalREDIE — including when state officials became aware of the issue and the extent to which it has affected both the case count and positivity rate — noting only that “these are all issues we are looking into.”
Still, the system-wide problem wasn’t believed to have an impact on the numbers of COVID-19 deaths or hospitalizations, which are reported separately. Those figures have been moving in opposite directions, with a decreasing number of hospital patients over the past three weeks while daily death tolls continue to rise.
Word of the reporting snafu first came Tuesday, when CHHS Secretary Mark Ghaly told reporters that “discrepancies” in the CalREDIE system had been discovered in the past few days.
“We’re working hard and immediately to reach out to the labs that we work with to get accurate information in a manual process so that we can feed that to our county partners,” Ghaly said.
Just a day earlier, however, Gov. Gavin Newsom had touted the lower case numbers in Southern California, pointing out during a press briefing that cases had “stabilized.” Overall across the state, the seven-day case average had declined by about 21% since the prior week, a trend that the governor praised as “good news.”
Newsom was made aware of the reporting problem on Monday evening, according to spokesperson Nathan Click.
Counties around the state meanwhile reported their second-highest number of deaths on any single day Tuesday, while hospitalizations fell to their lowest level in nearly a month, according to data compiled by this news organization.
The 167 newly reported fatalities Wednesday — down slightly from 197 Tuesday — pushed the state’s seven-day average to its second-highest point of the pandemic: about 138 Californians dying from the virus each day over the past week. The average daily death toll has jumped about 11% just since last week, according to this news organization’s analysis.
The faulty numbers led health experts to believe that the state had passed its peak of cases and could expect daily deaths to top off soon, too. But the unreliable testing and case data has thrown that consensus into question.
However, the dovetailing trend of hospitalizations gives some credence to the notion that the state is moving in the right direction.
In the past week, the state has shed some 500 patients from its hospital count, down 8.5% to 6,182 on Tuesday, according to the California Department of Public Health. The last time there were fewer patients currently hospitalized was July 9.
With just 5,730 new cases reported Wednesday, that seven-day average fell to 6,732 cases per day, a 26% decline since last week and the lowest it has been since July 5. The positivity rate of tests reported over the past week has fallen to its lowest point since June 28, the last time it was below the 6% threshold.
But, just like recent case counts, “the seven-day positivity rate is absolutely affected by this,” Ghaly said.
In Santa Clara County, data indicated the underreported tests dated back to July 16 — resulting in nearly a month of incomplete results.
“We’re back to feeling blind. We don’t know how the epidemic is trending,” Cody said. “This lack of data doesn’t allow us to know where this epidemic is heading, how fast it’s growing — or not.”
