Written By" Anokhi Luthra
In the first week of August 2020, the state of California realized that the number of COVID-19 cases was being underreported. Since July 25, the number of cases being reported from Santa Clara County was incorrect due to a glitch caused by a server outage in one of the largest commercial labs. This glitch led to around 300,000 health records being unprocessed, and not reaching the state’s reporting system. The California Health and Human Services Secretary revealed that many of the records involved were regarding COVID-19. The records that caused a backlog in the glitch contained some duplicates, so the state has to sort through them and eliminate the copies. The data system didn’t have an accurate number, which led to an incorrect positivity rate, and counties not being able to respond to the number of cases properly.
Since then, this glitch in the system has been fixed, but it took a few days to make up for the incorrect numbers. Luckily, no actions were taken to change California’s policies regarding treatment due to the incomplete data. Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered a full investigation and says that people will be held accountable for this oversight. This problem also affected local health officers, because they didn’t know how to address the crisis if they didn’t have the correct numbers and data. The Contra Costa Health Services have had to stop calculating their positivity rates because the rate looked incorrectly high after the period that had missing records. This issue is not only an inconvenience for all the workers, but it also prevents them from seeing how fast the cases are rising, and which way the pandemic is heading.
Each state has a COVID-19 watch list, and many counties are trying to get off that list before schools reopen. No counties have been removed or added to that list because the state doesn’t know what the numbers are like in the areas where they weren’t receiving data from. An office in Solano County noticed the difference in the numbers and immediately alerted the state on July 23. The numbers being reported are constantly fluctuating, but this big jump in numbers due to duplicates was a red flag, so they thought the best thing to do would be to notify the state. The state began working on the issue immediately, and said that it was a “tricky situation to solve”.
The reason the system had a glitch was because it wasn’t built to withstand this many records and cases. The system has been overloaded, and the state says that these kinds of glitches were expected. One of California’s top public health officers, Dr. Sonia Angell, resigned the following weekend after the data glitch, calling it a personal responsibility. She was the director of the Public Health Department and the state’s chief public health officer, so now her job responsibilities are being shared by two other county officers.
A testing officer in Santa Clara County says that the information they had been receiving wasn’t incorrect. They simply weren’t getting all of it. Regardless of this issue, the state eventually got the correct data, and the numbers are going back to normal and now the cases being reported are reflecting the actual numbers.
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