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The sharp decline in statewide coronavirus cases reported by California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday may have been erroneously caused by technical issues in the state's data system used to report COVID-19 test results, according to California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly.
In his Monday press briefing, Newsom reported the average daily number of new cases last week was 7,764, compared to roughly 9,800 the week before—a 26.2 percent reduction. However, Ghaly said technical issues with the state's test reporting system "absolutely affected" the numbers.
"This issue has undercounted the county's positive cases and affects the number of COVID-19 cases reported each day and our contact tracing efforts," a spokesperson for LA County said. Sacramento County also said technical issues may have caused underestimations of their official COVID-19 case counts.
It's unclear how many cases have been undercounted and for how long since the health department admitted to only learning of the technical issues related during an emergency meeting with state officials on Monday night, according to The Los Angeles Times.
To determine the accurate numbers for the past weeks, CHHS is contacting at least 81 laboratories for their test results from July 26 through the present.
"We're not sure when we'll have a definitive fix to the problem," Ghaly added, noting that the state hasn't yet figured out the reporting system's exact error.
In the meanwhile, CHHS will enter new case data manually and has advised people to observe longtime epidemic data trends rather than just daily tallies.
Despite the system's flaws, Newsom still reported some encouraging news. He said over the last week the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients had declined 10 percent statewide and the number of admissions into hospital intensive care units (ICUs) were down 5 percent statewide as well.
Ghaly said that the reporting system errors haven't affected numbers of hospitalizations and available beds in ICUs because those numbers are tallied using CALredie, a different system which connects labs to state and local health systems, according to the Times.
Nevertheless, as of August 4, California is the U.S. state with the highest overall number of COVID-19 cases at roughly 527,000. It also ranks behind New York and New Jersey as the U.S. state with the third-highest number of coronavirus-related deaths at 9,695 total.
"One week does not make the kind of trend that generates headlines," Newsom said during his Monday press conference. He added that he would only feel confident following several weeks of lower case numbers.
