LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – On Friday Lake County’s Public Health officer gave an update on the local COVID-19 caseload and testing issues, while a state official reported on efforts to resolve technical issues that led to delays in laboratory reporting.
Public Health Officer Dr. Gary Pace said Lake County reached 220 cases on Friday, an increase of 25 cases since his last detailed report on July 31.
Of those 220 cases, Pace said 24 are “active,” which means they are continuing to be monitored by Public Health staff, while 194 have recovered.
On Wednesday, Lake County’s second COVID-19-related death was reported. The first was reported on July 3.
There are no current hospitalizations, with total hospitalizations at 17, according to Public Health.
Lake County’s positivity rate was up to 4.6 percent on Friday, the Public Health COVID-19 dashboard showed.
“Overall COVID-19 activity remains manageable in Lake County,” Pace said.
Statewide, nearly 547,000 cases were reported by county Public Health departments as of Friday night, with California’s deaths now surpassing 10,100.
The California Department of Public Health said local health departments have reported 25,679 confirmed positive cases in health care workers and 131 deaths statewide.
Pace said Lake County is not on the state’s monitoring list, which currently has put restrictions on 38 counties representing 97 percent of the state’s population.
“We are in good shape with regard to state metrics at this time, but must remain vigilant for the long haul,” said Pace.
All of Lake’s neighboring counties are on the state’s monitoring list. They reported the following case numbers on Friday: Colusa, 362 cases, four deaths; Glenn, 360 cases, three deaths; Mendocino, 380 cases, 10 deaths; Napa, 1,046 cases, 10 deaths; Sonoma, 3,431 cases, 47 deaths; and Yolo, 1,690 cases, 43 deaths.
Lake County’s tests totaled 7,403 on Friday. The California Department of Public Health reported there have been 8,596,882 tests conducted in California, an increase of 96,419 over the prior 24-hour reporting period.
Pace said Lake County residents have recently reported delays of seven to 10 days or even greater when waiting for test results. He said Quest labs modified their sample evaluation procedures, and have outsourced more work to other labs.
He said Verily testing remains available five days a week in Lake County; register for appointments here. LabCorp has at-home testing kits, with a reported average turnaround time of two to three days.
Health and Human Services secretary discusses data issues
In other COVID-19 news, on Friday California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly gave an update on the technical issues that have led to the state’s delayed laboratory data reporting.
He said a server outage occurred on July 25 that created a delay in lab records coming into the state’s lab reporting system.
His agency instituted technical changes meant to help data flow more quickly into the system. Those technical changes were supposed to be temporary but were not later disabled, which Ghaly said caused further delays in lab data reports and created an extensive backlog.
Simultaneously, Health and Human Services officials discovered they were not receiving data from one of their largest commercial labs from July 31 to Aug. 4, which Ghaly said was the result of the state not renewing a certificate in a timely manner.
He said he became aware of the backlog late on Monday afternoon and alerted Gov. Gavin Newsom and his senior staff shortly thereafter.
Ghaly said the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange, or CalREDIE – which is the California Department of Public Health's communicable disease reporting and surveillance system – “was not built for this volume of data.”
“In order to create a lasting solution, we are accelerating the development of a new laboratory reporting system for COVID-19,” he said.
In the short term, Ghaly said they have reversed the technical changes made last month that were supposed to be temporary and renewed the certificate to allow for data transfer.
Ghaly said they are now putting in place new protocols and notifications when any changes are made, upgrading servers to ensure extra capacity and now have a redundant system that validates the data and reports.
“The governor has directed a full investigation of what happened and we will hold people accountable,” Ghaly said.
As of Friday afternoon, Ghaly said over the previous 24 hours his agency had seen a normalization of the flow of data coming into its lab reporting system.
In the coming 24 to 48 hours, Ghaly said they expected the backlog that is between 250,000 and 300,000 records will be resolved, giving them a better sense of the total number of tests that were delayed.
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Public Health officer issues COVID-19 update; state Health and Human Services reports on lab data backlog
- Elizabeth Larson
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