A top California health official says a technical glitch that caused a lag in collecting coronavirus test information has been fixed, but it could take up to 48 hours to get the data updated.
Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said Friday that up to 300,000 records might have been backlogged—but not all of them are coronavirus cases and some may be duplicates. Nevertheless, that backlog could affect numbers that counties and cities have reported about their residents because, in some cases, they rely on the statewide system, which Ghaly said was never intended to handle such a large volume of cases.
Ghaly said the problem began with a computer server outage in late July. The outage forced the state to use a workaround that was supposed to be temporary, but it wasn’t disabled when the server problem was fixed. He said in one case, a major lab didn’t get any information into the state system for five straight days.
It’s unclear how many of the backlogged tests are positive or how many are from Long Beach, but the city began reporting a decline in cases around the time the glitch happened.
During the last week of July, Long Beach reported 774 new cases compared to 1,034 the week before. This week, Long Beach has reported 663 positives, including 66 on Friday. It’s unclear how much those number will change when the missing data starts rolling in.
Hospitalizations are down, but officials don’t know if COVID-19 case numbers are following
Despite the lag in numbers, Ghaly said officials believe overall downward trend of COVID-19 cases remain consistent. The error, he said, hasn’t affected hospitalization and death numbers, which have been showing declines.
The number of hospitalizations have also been lower for Long Beach residents. They were down to 89 on Friday after averaging more than 100 in the two previous weeks.
In all, 181 Long Beach residents have died of COVID-19 and 8,775 have tested positive, city officials said Friday.
Statewide, California has surpassed 10,000 deaths from the coronavirus.
In a conference call Friday, reporters questioned Ghaly about why the state hadn’t noticed the reporting problem earlier.
Marin County flagged the problem in mid-July when it started seeing a growing gap between the number of cases reported directly from labs and the state’s numbers, said Dr. Matt Willis, the county’s public health officer. The county receives about 90% of its results directly from labs and relies on the state system for the rest.
It became an issue when residents began asking why the county was reporting more cases than the state, pushing Marin County over the limit set by Newsom’s administration for elementary schools to reopen—but only by the county’s estimates and not the state’s, he said.
Marin estimated the county had 210 cases for every 100,000 residents over a 14-day period, while the state estimated there were 170, he said. He estimated about a fifth of virus testing data to the state could be delayed.
“We’re in an interval now where we’ve been seeing significant increases in cases across the state. There’s been a lot of policy responses to that,” he said, “This is a particularly vulnerable moment for us as a state to lose access to data.”
Long Beach Post Breaking News Editor Jeremiah Dobruck contributed to this report.