Gov. Newsom says California coronavirus data are correct after administration shake-up
SACRAMENTO - Responding to one of California's biggest setbacks since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday said his administration has fixed a public health computer database failure that distorted test results across the state and raised doubts about actions taken to stem the spread of coronavirus.
Newsom faced reporters for the first time since he touted the inaccurate data as a positive sign of fewer infections a day before the glitches became public. The governor said he was unaware of the problem, even though state health officials warned counties about data issues days earlier.
On Sunday, the state announced the abrupt departure of Dr. Sonia Angell, the director of the California Department of Public Health, the agency in charge of collecting the electronic test results.
"These things are unfortunate, but we are moving forward," Newsom told reporters during a news briefing Monday in Sacramento. "I'm governor. The buck stops with me."
Newsom declined to say whether he asked Angell to resign and sidestepped a question about her leadership of the agency during the pandemic. He said he felt it was appropriate to accept her resignation.
"She resigned. She wrote a resignation letter, and I accepted her resignation," Newsom said. "We're all accountable in our respective roles for what happens underneath us."
Newsom blamed the issues with the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange, or CalREDIE, on the state's archaic technology systems and cited similar processing delays and problems at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the state Employment Development Department, which has faced sharp criticism for failing to process unemployment insurance applications filed by millions of out-of-work Californians. The governor said replacing those systems is one of this administration's top priorities.
Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant and former communications director to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said Newsom's explanation Monday on the data failure and Angell's departure fell far short of the public accountability Californians deserve.
"It took him a week to stand in front of Californians and address this issue," Stutzman said. " ... He owes a better explanation of the Sunday night massacre that led to her departure."
Dr. Mark Ghaly, California's health and human services director, said between 250,000 and 300,000 test results had not been uploaded to the database, and that the malfunction began July 25. Ghaly said all of those problems have been fixed, all backlogged test results have been processed, and that the findings had been shared with county health officials across the state.
To ensure that the state doesn't experience similar breakdowns, computing capacity was increased fourfold at CalREDIE, the electronic disease reporting and surveillance system overseen by the California Department of Public Health, Ghaly said.
Still, the Newsom administration's decisions on which counties would be allowed to resume activities and reopen schools and businesses, including restaurants, was based in part on positive coronavirus test data.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti last week expressed frustration over the state's unreliable test results and said the problem may have been much more extensive than revealed by the Newsom administration.
"We don't believe that it's something that just happened in the last two or three weeks. The state has told us that these reporting problems may have been throughout (the pandemic)," Garcetti told reporters Wednesday. "So it would be, I think, wrong to conclude that somehow numbers have come down because the reporting system just in the last two weeks has changed. This is something that they've uncovered that probably has been with us since months ago."
On Friday, Ghaly said that a server outage caused a delay in health records flowing into CalREDIE and that mistakes by the administration exacerbated the problem.
"The governor has directed a full investigation of what happened and we will hold people accountable," Ghaly said last week.
After the July 25 server outage caused a delay in processing data, the state implemented "technical changes that allowed the records to flow into the system more quickly," Ghaly said. The changes needed to be disabled later, but weren't, which caused "further delays in our reporting of lab data and creating an extensive backlog," he said.
Officials also discovered that Quest Diagnostics, one of the biggest labs in the state, was unable to report lab data to the system for five days from July 31 through Aug. 4, further skewing the data. Ghaly said the state failed to renew a certificate that allowed Quest to transmit information into the system.
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