Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Printable Version
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Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Goose - 08-05-2020
San Mateo County has removed all the information regarding contact tracing that previously appeared on their web site. Her is the quote as to why.
Quote:Due to a significant and unresolved problem with the State of California’s reporting system for communicable diseases (California Reportable Disease Information Exchange [CalREDIE]), San Mateo County Health, as well as county public health departments statewide, are experiencing significant underreporting of COVID-19 testing results. The State has confirmed that the test results data we have received is valid, but incomplete. We do not yet know the extent of this issue or when the State will be able to resolve it, but we are in communication with the State along with all the counties and will support their efforts to rapidly resolve this issue. We are also working closely with the State to implement parallel procedures to assure our staff can continue to conduct effective contact tracing and case investigations to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in our community. Until we receive confirmation from the State that the data is once again being fully reported, members of the public should assume that any dashboard elements that rely on test results are incomplete. We have temporarily removed some dashboards from this website until there is resolution of this problem.https://www.smchealth.org/coronavirus-metric-scorecards
Obviously, this is a problem of major proportions six months into the epidemic. How is this possible? With this kind of incompetence at the State level there is no way we avoid more and more deaths. While I believe the data was removed from the website partly because it raised real serious questions about the contact tracking and tracing program (i.e. the State reporting problem is an excuse), this kind of a problem at the State level will mess up any attempt to figure out what is happening with case numbers and anything derived therefrom.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - BostonCard - 08-05-2020
Is this related to the delay in getting testing results or is it a problem in not reporting results after they are back?
BC
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - OutsiderFan - 08-05-2020
As I have seen the reported new case numbers across the country decline to ~50k a day from the previous week's 60k-70k range, I am skeptical. I see no reason cases should have declined that much from week-to-week, unless the population started taking the virus seriously a week before the numbers went into the 70ks, because it take two weeks for behavior changes to show in the data.
I'm not aware of more mask orders or shutdowns that happened a week before the big July spike, and the IHME social distancing data doesn't suggest people stopped traveling much to stop slow spread. Could it be people voluntarily pulled back from risky behavior when they saw the numbers rising so much?
It feels like we are operating blind with only our sense of smell and touch to guide us. We smell smoke but have no idea where the fire is.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - dabigv13 - 08-05-2020
SoCal hospitalization and ICU both continuing to trend down down over past two weeks. Seems nationally most places are now past the second peak.
My take on it is that the second peak was caused by people thinking the worst was behind us, and time to get back to normal, in some places quicker than others. Once it became clear that previously spared "hot virus killing sun" states Texas and Arizona were starting to trend towards NYC level crisis care, most people realized this thing was real, it could affect any location, and it's going to be with us for a while now, so a new normal is needed. Mask mandates are present in most states now I believe. And you don't hear as much about anti mask protests anymore. Even POTUS has worn a mask and toned down the reopen everything ASAP rhetoric.
Now we find out if we can maintain the discipline needed to prevent a third peak. I worry about schools, but thankfully it seems California at least will not be doing in person schooling for the most part any time soon.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Goose - 08-05-2020
(08-05-2020, 01:46 PM)BostonCard Wrote: Is this related to the delay in getting testing results or is it a problem in not reporting results after they are back?Unclear based on what San Mateo County is reporting, but it would appear based on what they wrote that the State numbers are just plain wrong, i.e. some significant number of results don't ever make it into the State system at all.
BC
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Farm93 - 08-05-2020
(08-05-2020, 02:23 PM)OutsiderFan Wrote: As I have seen the reported new case numbers across the country decline to ~50k a day from the previous week's 60k-70k range, I am skeptical. I see no reason cases should have declined that much from week-to-week, unless the population started taking the virus seriously a week before the numbers went into the 70ks, because it take two weeks for behavior changes to show in the data.The lack of testing supplies is a variable that could explain a lot.
I'm not aware of more mask orders or shutdowns that happened a week before the big July spike, and the IHME social distancing data doesn't suggest people stopped traveling much to stop slow spread. Could it be people voluntarily pulled back from risky behavior when they saw the numbers rising so much?
It feels like we are operating blind with only our sense of smell and touch to guide us. We smell smoke but have no idea where the fire is.
However about 3 weeks ago a number of rather large retailers started requiring masks for all employees and customers. For a lot of USA citizens addressing the Wal-Mart, Costco, Home Depot type outings will cover a large percentage of their ventures away from home.
At that time also had a number of GOP officials starting to acknowledge that wearing a mask was probably a good idea.
And Trump started to issue some pro-mask comments too.
I realize those events many not impact everyone, but there are probably some people that changed behavior because of those actions. And even if a few altered their behavior a few weeks ago we could now be enjoying those benefits, in the form of a slightly less aggressive rate of expansion, today.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - chrisk - 08-05-2020
This is the message on the SCC dashboard
Quote:Due to a significant and unresolved problem with the State of California’s reporting system for communicable diseases (California Reportable Disease Information Exchange (CalREDIE)), the County of Santa Clara Public Health Department, as well as county public health departments statewide, are experiencing significant underreporting of COVID-19 testing results. The State has informed us that counties have received incomplete information regarding test results, which affects our ability to identify new cases of COVID-19, to accurately report the testing positivity rate in our community, and to identify the number of persons tested for the last few weeks. Without timely reports of all new lab results, it is impossible for State and local health officials to identify the extent to which COVID-19 is circulating in the community. It also hinders our ability to conduct effective contact tracing and case investigations to slow the spread of COVID-19.
We do not yet know the extent of this issue or when the State will be able to resolve it, but we are in communication with the State and have offered to provide whatever assistance it may need to rapidly resolve this issue. In the meantime, we will continue to report the testing data we do receive and will make clear to the public which data reported on our website are affected by this issue. The State confirmed that the data actually received is valid, but incomplete. We expect the testing positivity rate, the daily and cumulative case counts, and other data points on the County’s COVID-19 data dashboards to change as more complete test results are reported to the County of Santa Clara Public Health Department.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - CardinalSagehen - 08-05-2020
Despite the fact that case counts are mostly useless as a metric for several other reasons, this bug in the State's CalREDIE system is absolutely freaking infuriating. Even more infuriating is the fact that it has persisted for three weeks without an announcement, an estimated order of magnitude, or an ETA for the fix.
In a sad and ironic twist, this comes at a time when the criteria for the county watch-list are based in part on case counts per capita. Decisions that influence the health and fate of 40,000,000 people, tens of thousands of local businesses, millions of employees, and more than 6,000,000 K-12 students supposedly hinge on this data. (Note that I am not trying to grind an axe for in-person instruction vs. distance learning. I'm just pointing out the inanity of the whole situation.)
https://calmatters.org/health/2020/08/covid-undercount-technical-glitch/
Quote:“We’ve discovered some discrepancies,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s health and human services secretary in a press call. Data, he said, is “getting stuck” in the electronic system that feeds information from test labs to both the state and local public health departments.
May I suggest, as a fall-back plan, the use of carrier pigeons, slide rules and town criers to tabulate and report the results publicly? Or snail-mail, manual tabulation, and static HTML, at worst?
Dr. Mark Ghaly, please have the engineers responsible for the CalREDIE system work 7 days/week until this bug is fixed. I've seen occasional bugs on The CARDBoard fixed by unpaid community volunteers with a greater sense of urgency than this life-and-death matter seems to be receiving.
Sorry, I'm usually pretty calm and level-headed, but this really put me over the top. We aren't talking about an mRNA vaccine, a clinical trial or putting a man on the moon here. In its simplest form, we're talking about communication of numbers (or individual results) so they can be ADDED TO A TOTAL.
[/rant]
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Goose - 08-05-2020
Another strange thing is that while SMC and SCC have these disclaimers on their site, San Francisco county has no such reference. Their data, included contact tracing data, is being updated "normally". It may be bogus, but either they don't know it or they aren't using State numbers. his situation gets stranger by the minute.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - OutsiderFan - 08-05-2020
OK, I’ll buy some impact to push down spread could be a result of national retailers requiring masks. However, given the rate of transmission, that doesn’t explain a 20k daily reduction.
So we have SCC’s data fiasco that it says is under reporting cases based on faulty data collection and aggregation methods. Who knows how many counties and states are similarly plagued.
But here’s some evidence of deliberate attempts to ignore the amount of spread:
https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Iowa-governor-orders-reduced-testing-at-Dubuque-15423753.php
The AP also reported overall testing capacity has dropped 3.5% over the last two weeks.
But you can’t hide the deaths, which continue to climb.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - oldalum - 08-05-2020
While we're on the topic of delays in reporting testing results, I can provide one real-time last week SCC example: my son flew in for his first visit since December. After arriving here, he self-isolated within our house--which of course affects his interactions with the rest of his family--and after 5 days got a test at a SCC pop-up site in San Jose. He was informed how to access the test results and that they would not be available for another 10-14 days. By which time he'll have left anyway. I am really unclear what benefit there is to the test--to him, us or the county--when the results are not available for that long. Seems like a waste of testing resources.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - CardinalSagehen - 08-05-2020
(08-05-2020, 07:31 PM)oldalum Wrote: While we're on the topic of delays in reporting testing results, I can provide one real-time last week SCC example: my son flew in for his first visit since December. After arriving here, he self-isolated within our house--which of course affects his interactions with the rest of his family--and after 5 days got a test at a SCC pop-up site in San Jose. He was informed how to access the test results and that they would not be available for another 10-14 days. By which time he'll have left anyway. I am really unclear what benefit there is to the test--to him, us or the county--when the results are not available for that long. Seems like a waste of testing resources.
No question. If that is the turnaround time due to current volumes, we might as well test a small but statistically valid sample of people and turn it around immediately. That would contribute more to public health and save more lives.
Or we could just spend billions fixing testing, because we're spending trillions the longer we don't.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - BostonCard - 08-05-2020
Deaths seem to have plateaued, as you might expect from a situation where case numbers plateaued and started falling last week. The last three days death totals have come in under the same day a week ago.
BC
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Goose - 08-05-2020
(08-05-2020, 07:10 PM)CardinalSagehen Wrote: Despite the fact that case counts are mostly useless as a metric for several other reasons, this bug in the State's CalREDIE system is absolutely freaking infuriating. Even more infuriating is the fact that it has persisted for three weeks without an announcement, an estimated order of magnitude, or an ETA for the fix.I share your incredulity that this could be happening in California six months into the mission. Many facilities report to CalREDIE electronically. We all know that data doesn't "get stuck" in a software system. It is worrisome when a public official says something like that. Either they are trying to dumb it down for the public or they are a pointy-haired boss type repeating what they were told. If the latter, yikes!
In a sad and ironic twist, this comes at a time when the criteria for the county watch-list are based in part on case counts per capita. Decisions that influence the health and fate of 40,000,000 people, tens of thousands of local businesses, millions of employees, and more than 6,000,000 K-12 students supposedly hinge on this data. (Note that I am not trying to grind an axe for in-person instruction vs. distance learning. I'm just pointing out the inanity of the whole situation.)
https://calmatters.org/health/2020/08/covid-undercount-technical-glitch/
Quote:“We’ve discovered some discrepancies,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s health and human services secretary in a press call. Data, he said, is “getting stuck” in the electronic system that feeds information from test labs to both the state and local public health departments.
May I suggest, as a fall-back plan, the use of carrier pigeons, slide rules and town criers to tabulate and report the results publicly? Or snail-mail, manual tabulation, and static HTML, at worst?
Dr. Mark Ghaly, please have the engineers responsible for the CalREDIE system work 7 days/week until this bug is fixed. I've seen occasional bugs on The CARDBoard fixed by unpaid community volunteers with a greater sense of urgency than this life-and-death matter seems to be receiving.
Sorry, I'm usually pretty calm and level-headed, but this really put me over the top. We aren't talking about an mRNA vaccine, a clinical trial or putting a man on the moon here. In its simplest form, we're talking about communication of numbers (or individual results) so they can be ADDED TO A TOTAL.
[/rant]
The problem may be the software doesn't throw errors when the input from a facility contains errors. It just silently skips reporting it. In any case, it should be pretty simple to trace down the problem. They should know what is wrong by now. The fact they don't seem to is very concerning.
Many have lamented our problems on a national level, rightly IMHO. Here in California we now have something that all of us should be raising holy hell about. We are the home of Silicon Valley. I am sure there are piles of people available who can fix this kind of a problem. Yet here we sit, unable to know what is going on, because of a software problem in a system that has been running for at least six months. How is that even possible?
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - OutsiderFan - 08-06-2020
If our space program was run with the same competence and accountability that we see applied to our pandemic response, would we still be trying to achieve low Earth orbit? Would we have even successfully had a rocket clear the launchpad tower since starting the effort in the 1950s? Would we have just thrown up our hands, concluded rocketry is too hard, and basically given up trying to get off the Earth?
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - M T - 08-06-2020
Actually, to me, "getting stuck" sounds encouraging. That suggests the information is in the system somewhere. "getting lost" or "getting dropped" would sound much more worrisome. Fixing the problem may be simple. What will be hard is making sure the "stuck" information (and only it) is processed.
When those numbers come through, there will be a big hit to California (and the country's numbers). If California has been undercounting by half for two weeks, that's a lot of cases. BUT, I only suspect "by half" for SCC and San Mateo County. I don't have any sufficient evidence to say the numbers are down by half in L.A. County. It doesn't seem likely.
I would also be worried that a similar problem could have been ongoing. The current situation hints that there may not be adequate safeguards to be sure that the data that goes in is actually being processed. I hope they're reviewing that as well to make sure it wasn't happening (perhaps to a lesser extent) prior to July 20th or so.
I don't know when they first found out there was something other than a delay. I commented about the > 50% drop in a comment to SCC PHD on Friday July 31 to which they responded on Aug 2:
Quote:The current testing data set for the past 2 weeks do not reflect the actual number of tests conducted. There is currently a backlog of tests that have yet to be recorded and are not represented on the testing dashboard. Please continue to check back as we update the testing figures and fix the positivity rate that you discovered to be incorrectly computed.
At that time, the responder (not part of the data team, but one who responds to comments from the public) clearly didn't understand the situation as more than a delay. (As indicated in other posts, I thought the 50% drop was due to the decision not to process samples of people in Tier 4.)
The data calculation error I reported was that SCC (not the state) was calculating 7-day percent positive numbers by averaging the percent positive of each of the 7 days (while the state specified calculating number of positives over 7 days divided by number of tests over 7 days). As a result, SCC's graph of %-positive values were slightly too high (I'd say about 5% too high: say 4.0% reported vs 3.8%). (The low volume days contributed more than they should.)
The sudden inclusion of the "stuck" data is going to impact the state's monitoring list dramatically.
As I expected, Santa Clara dropped out of the monitoring list in the list released on July 29. (But, surprisingly to me, San Mateo County was added, for having too many new cases. Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda, and Sonoma Counties dropped out the same day, and they were the only ones that dropped out.)
That list wasn't updated again until August 2, at which point those counties again were on the list (except Sonoma, which remained off). The list as of August 5 hasn't changed since August 2. Previously, the list was changing daily. That may be a hint that the state realized something was wrong by July 30. (I'm surprised the Governor didn't reference it in his public comments earlier this week.)
The dropping of the several Bay Area counties suggests to me that the "stuck" data may be because of some regional difference. Maybe the problem only affects the Bay Area counties. (But I did report that Orange County had a notice about the problem.) Or it may be that the counties using certain software are being affected.
And, by the way, if you haven't looked, the list indicates that the hospitalization numbers (showing "N/A" now) haven't been updated since July 23, due to changes in federal reporting requirements. So, the most critical numbers (number of beds available) aren't being reported!!
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Genuine Realist - 08-06-2020
(08-05-2020, 07:29 PM)OutsiderFan Wrote: OK, I’ll buy some impact to push down spread could be a result of national retailers requiring masks. However, given the rate of transmission, that doesn’t explain a 20k daily reduction.I don't see why any of this should be a surprise, as the public increasingly comes to understand and accept the norms of social distancing.
So we have SCC’s data fiasco that it says is under reporting cases based on faulty data collection and aggregation methods. Who knows how many counties and states are similarly plagued.
But here’s some evidence of deliberate attempts to ignore the amount of spread:
https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Iowa-governor-orders-reduced-testing-at-Dubuque-15423753.php
The AP also reported overall testing capacity has dropped 3.5% over the last two weeks.
But you can’t hide the deaths, which continue to climb.
I suggestd long ago that the discipline of major retailers would be a major factor, and so it may be proving. Not only does such practice reduce places of contagion, but it also sets a powerful example for other modes of socialization.
As to rising deaths, I only follow Santa Clara County. It has been interesting over the past two months that death rates have NOT spiked, even though case counts rose significantly. Hospitalizations rose dramatically at the start, then leveled off at about 180. But they never rose in proportion to the case census.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - teejers1 - 08-06-2020
(08-06-2020, 08:32 AM)Genuine Realist Wrote:(08-05-2020, 07:29 PM)OutsiderFan Wrote: OK, I’ll buy some impact to push down spread could be a result of national retailers requiring masks. However, given the rate of transmission, that doesn’t explain a 20k daily reduction.I don't see why any of this should be a surprise, as the public increasingly comes to understand and accept the norms of social distancing.
So we have SCC’s data fiasco that it says is under reporting cases based on faulty data collection and aggregation methods. Who knows how many counties and states are similarly plagued.
But here’s some evidence of deliberate attempts to ignore the amount of spread:
https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Iowa-governor-orders-reduced-testing-at-Dubuque-15423753.php
The AP also reported overall testing capacity has dropped 3.5% over the last two weeks.
But you can’t hide the deaths, which continue to climb.
I suggestd long ago that the discipline of major retailers would be a major factor, and so it may be proving. Not only does such practice reduce places of contagion, but it also sets a powerful example for other modes of socialization.
As to rising deaths, I only follow Santa Clara County. It has been interesting over the past two months that death rates have NOT spiked, even though case counts rose significantly. Hospitalizations rose dramatically at the start, then leveled off at about 180. But they never rose in proportion to the case census.
I appreciate MT's posts (and his avid following of county and state data). But I also find it hard to believe that hospitalization numbers would suffer from whatever glitch is apparently infecting (pun intended) the count on number of tests, positive test rate, etc. Those strike me as completely different sets of numbers (and magnitudes of same) that would be reported differently. Hospitals know how many patients are in beds (acute and ICU), what % of those in those beds are Covid patients, and number of excess beds available. I find it hard to believe that any mix up in testing data would cripple hospitalization numbers.
As to GR's point on SCC hospitalization spiking, it was separately reported that patients from Imperial County and San Quentin prison were sent to hospitals in the Bay Area. The number was never disclosed (nor location of where patients ended up), which is mind-boggling. But the point is that the "spike" in SCC hospitalization could be attributable to these "outside county" numbers. It's astounding to me that this data is not being shared.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Goose - 08-06-2020
(08-06-2020, 09:41 AM)teejers1 Wrote: As to GR's point on SCC hospitalization spiking, it was separately reported that patients from Imperial County and San Quentin prison were sent to hospitals in the Bay Area. The number was never disclosed (nor location of where patients ended up), which is mind-boggling. But the point is that the "spike" in SCC hospitalization could be attributable to these "outside county" numbers. It's astounding to me that this data is not being shared.FWIW, San Mateo County does have a "% patients from outside county" on it's website. One doesn't know what that means exactly, but it was 21% two weeks(approximately) ago and is now 4%. Could be the same situation.
Cancel my last. The SMC website has been updated to say "Out of County means the patient was an emergency transfer from a state or out of county facility". SMC tells it like it is, at least in this case. By now, the number is small enough to ignore.
RE: Confirmation of Reporting Problems - Genuine Realist - 08-06-2020
(08-06-2020, 09:41 AM)teejers1 Wrote:Hospitalizations rose, then leveled off. FWIW, the number dropped dramatically yesterday.(08-06-2020, 08:32 AM)Genuine Realist Wrote:(08-05-2020, 07:29 PM)OutsiderFan Wrote: OK, I’ll buy some impact to push down spread could be a result of national retailers requiring masks. However, given the rate of transmission, that doesn’t explain a 20k daily reduction.I don't see why any of this should be a surprise, as the public increasingly comes to understand and accept the norms of social distancing.
So we have SCC’s data fiasco that it says is under reporting cases based on faulty data collection and aggregation methods. Who knows how many counties and states are similarly plagued.
But here’s some evidence of deliberate attempts to ignore the amount of spread:
https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Iowa-governor-orders-reduced-testing-at-Dubuque-15423753.php
The AP also reported overall testing capacity has dropped 3.5% over the last two weeks.
But you can’t hide the deaths, which continue to climb.
I suggestd long ago that the discipline of major retailers would be a major factor, and so it may be proving. Not only does such practice reduce places of contagion, but it also sets a powerful example for other modes of socialization.
As to rising deaths, I only follow Santa Clara County. It has been interesting over the past two months that death rates have NOT spiked, even though case counts rose significantly. Hospitalizations rose dramatically at the start, then leveled off at about 180. But they never rose in proportion to the case census.
I appreciate MT's posts (and his avid following of county and state data). But I also find it hard to believe that hospitalization numbers would suffer from whatever glitch is apparently infecting (pun intended) the count on number of tests, positive test rate, etc. Those strike me as completely different sets of numbers (and magnitudes of same) that would be reported differently. Hospitals know how many patients are in beds (acute and ICU), what % of those in those beds are Covid patients, and number of excess beds available. I find it hard to believe that any mix up in testing data would cripple hospitalization numbers.
As to GR's point on SCC hospitalization spiking, it was separately reported that patients from Imperial County and San Quentin prison were sent to hospitals in the Bay Area. The number was never disclosed (nor location of where patients ended up), which is mind-boggling. But the point is that the "spike" in SCC hospitalization could be attributable to these "outside county" numbers. It's astounding to me that this data is not being shared.