California’s COVID-19 tracking system failed. This is what is being done to fix it

A server outage and a delay in renewing a certificate to receive lab data blocked thousands of COVID-19 test results from reaching the state since late last month, keeping officials in the dark about the disease’s spread, California’s health agency chief said Friday.

“Our data system failed, and that failure led to inaccurate case numbers and positivity rates,” Dr. Mark Ghaly said. “We apologize. You deserve better. The governor demands better.”

At a Friday press conference, Ghaly detailed the sequence of events that blocked hundreds of thousands of disease records from the state’s Reportable Disease Information Exchange, known as CalREDIE.

His remarks capped a week of confusion for county officials and the public while state officials investigated the issue, which they first acknowledged Monday.

The glitch interfered with local efforts to track the spread of the infection, offer services to people who tested positive for COVID-19, and assess readiness to open schools, local officials said earlier this week.

Ghaly said his office believes the problem began July 25, when a server running part of the overtaxed system lost power. Officials made some “technical changes” to address the problem, but then did not revert those changes, causing further data delays.

Around the same time, the state stopped receiving data from Quest labs, a major source of COVID-19 case information, because officials failed to renew a certificate to receive the data on time, Ghaly said.

Now, the state has an estimated backlog of 250,000 to 300,000 disease reports to process, most of which are COVID-19 cases. Officials have implemented a series of workarounds and checks to ensure data is processed on time moving forward, Ghaly said.

The state is building a new system to replace CalREDIE, which was never designed to handle the massive influx of data caused by the pandemic, Ghaly said.

Despite the data problems, Ghaly said the state is still confident in the actions it has taken to address the virus. He said he’s also confident that COVID-19 cases are declining, based on decreasing hospitalization numbers that aren’t affected by the CalREDIE glitches.

This story was originally published August 7, 2020 at 3:15 PM with the headline "California’s COVID-19 tracking system failed. This is what is being done to fix it."