Covid-19 Live Updates: Global Tracker – The New York Times

As California surpassed 10,000 coronavirus deaths this week, the head of the states Health and Human Services Agency, Dr. Mark Ghaly, said a breakdown in the main disease reporting system had undercounted as many as 300,000 test results.

Our data system failed, and that failure led to inaccurate case numbers, Dr. Ghaly said.

The malfunctions in the data system were compounded in recent days by huge backlogs in testing in some California counties results are taking more than two weeks to process muddying the overall picture of the viruss progression in the nations most populous state.

The breakdown dates to July 25, when a server failed, and the agency separately stopped receiving data from one of the largest labs in the state, Dr. Ghaly said. The missing data, which could amount to thousands of positive test results not previously recorded, would be added to the system within days, he said.

With well over 500,000 cases and 10,042 deaths, California has the third highest coronavirus death toll in the United States, behind New York, which has had more than 32,000 deaths, and New Jersey with over 15,000, according to a New York Times database. On a per capita basis, California ranks 29th in reported coronavirus deaths.

Despite the undercounting of cases, officials say they believe the overall encouraging trends reported by Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier in the week still hold. Mr. Newsom had reported a decline of more than 20 percent in the seven-day average of cases.

We believe that the trend has been stabilizing and coming down, Dr. Ghaly said, an assessment partly based on hospitalization rates, which are calculated using separate data systems.

Read more:

Covid-19 Live Updates: Global Tracker - The New York Times