California Governor Gavin Newsom held his first press conference in a week after it was revealed that the COVID-19 database collection of COVID-19 coronavirus daily case numbers had been corrupted for at least two weeks.
On Sunday, the director of the State of Public Health resigned, presumably over the data leak. Dr Sonia Angell was the first Latina to ever have the role and her dismissal came after less than a year on the job. Newsom issued a terse, one-sentence statement out of thanks to Angell.
Newsom was asked several times about the dismissal during his news conference. He declined several times to discuss specifications about Angell’s resignation before saying, “I’m governor, the dollar stops with me.”
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When Newsom made his remarks, The Sacramento Bee reported that another recent dismissal – that last week from CalPERS ‘chief investor, who oversaw the massive state pension fund – followed an anonymous complaint to the California ethics watchdog agency amid allegations that the CIO had approved a $ 1 billion deal with a company in which he is a shareholder.
Newsom did not comment on the reported ethics complaint
Hy the talk at length about the data problems.
On Friday, California Health and Human Services Dr. Mark Ghaly held a news conference acknowledging that multiple failures on the part of the state were causing a backlog of 250,000-300,000 records in their system reporting business. This system is mainly used to print and distribute coronavirus data.
The error caused an undercount in the state daily new COVID-19 case data for the past two weeks, Ghaly said. Numerous hospital and deaths were apparently unaffected.
The data disaster is particularly embarrassing for the governor, who loves to say “data is fundamental” for his decisions on coronavirus.
Newsom said on Monday that the system is decades old, one “we inherit”, and does not meet the requirements of a pandemic. He said the state “has databases that were never created for the world in which we live.”
“We are working to address these issues with fundamental data,” the governor said, before pledging to make an “idiosyncratic, long-term, sneaky attempt” to create a system that works.
“We are not going to … help this band,” Newsom said. “We are now responsible, responsible for being transparent in these things.
At the news conference on Monday, Ghaly announced that Sandra Shewry, who heads the health services department under former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, would act as director of public health. In 2007, the state divided the Health Services entity into the Department of Health Care Services and the Department of Public Health.
Ghaly also said the state has almost “doubled” its ability to process data over the weekend. As part of that, it was able to process all 250,000+ backward test records.
Newsom said that after the data is retrieved by the day it sounds good, the state will provide and update on figures.
The governor reported 7,751 new cases of coronavirus in the state. Newsom said the number of new cases is “accurate” and unaffected by the backlog.
Startlingly, the governor said 58.8 percent of COVID’s case numbers have “affected the Latino population.”
There were 66 new deaths for a total of just over 10,000. Newsom warned that that number could be low, as it often is on Mondays, due to a regular backlog of the weekend. There have been an average of 137 deaths per day in the past 14 days.
The number of hospitals has dropped below 6,000, which is down 19 percent over the past 14 days. There are currently 1,727 coronavirus patients in the ICU. That is a decrease of 13 percent.
