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The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) on Tuesday announced an underreporting of coronavirus cases due to issues with an electronic laboratory reporting system.
While the extent of the technical issues is unclear, officials said it does not affect patient care or test results. Hospitalization and death rates also remain unaffected because those figures are reported to the state through different systems, CDPH wrote in the update.
However, the issue may disrupt a county public health department’s ability to case investigate and contact trace, the CDPH said, suggesting that the issue is likely leading to an underreporting of cases at the local level, too.
“We’ve discovered some discrepancies,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, state Health and Human Services Secretary, of the data problems during a Tuesday COVID-19 update, streamed as a Zoom teleconference, according to the Sacramento Bee. “We’re working hard and immediately to reach out to the labs that we work with to get accurate information ... so we can feed that to our local county partners, that we can validate and make sure our numbers are accurate.”
Ghaly pointed out the technical issues to the high volume of case data, which is “testing the capacity” of the system, according to the outlet. He reportedly said he didn’t know when the issue would be resolved.
According to the outlet, new, statewide reported cases from Monday and Tuesday (5,739 and just over 4,500, respectively) would mark the "two lowest single-day increases since July 5..." Also, according to the LA Times, the issues stirred doubt over Gov. Gavin Newsom's Monday announcement of a 21.2% drop in positive infections over a 7-day average from the week prior.
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) on Tuesday announced an underreporting of coronavirus cases due to issues with an electronic laboratory reporting system. (iStock)
Ghaly said “the seven-day positivity rate is absolutely affected” by the technical issues, according to the LA Times.
To address the issue, CDPH said a team from the Department of Technology is assessing the underlying code of the state’s disease registry system, called CalREDIE. Local public health officers were reportedly engaged to make sure they have necessary information and all labs in the state were instructed to manually report positive cases to local public health departments.
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By Wednesday, the state reported 524,722 confirmed cases, and 9,703 deaths. The rate of positive tests over the last 14 days was reported to be 6.4%.
“Due to issues with the state’s electronic laboratory reporting system, these data represent an underreporting of actual positive cases in one single day,” officials noted below the figures.
When the technical issues are resolved, officials expect to see an “inflated surge” in case numbers because the backlog of old cases will finally be reported, the Sacramento Bee wrote.
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