Governor says California’s Covid-19 county monitoring list will soon be updated

California has worked through its data backlog of nearly 300,000 cases which will allow an update of the state’s county monitoring list, Gov. Newsom said Monday.

Newsom said the data been sent to counties to be properly counted on the dates they were collected, with demographic data added. He said he expects that data to be added retroactively to each county’s records within 72 hours, so that dashboards for the past 14 days can be corrected and the county monitoring list can be updated.

If a district’s county is on the monitoring list, the district would have to apply for a waiver to open for in-person instruction for K-6. That process has been frozen since July 31, county public health departments have been unable to decide on elementary school waivers because they could not be sure how many cases were occurring in their jurisdictions. Based on state guidance, no public or private school in a county on the monitoring list can open for in-person instruction unless it has received an elementary school waiver for students in grades K-6 or until the county has been removed from the list for 14 consecutive days.

In response to a question about Orange County, which has high concentrations of Covid-19 cases in some areas but much lower percentages of cases in others, Newsom said it might be appropriate to grant elementary school waivers in the areas with a lower number of cases. Ultimately, these decisions are made in consultation with the local county Department of Public Health.

At his press briefing, Newsom took questions about the data glitches that have prevented the state from accurately reporting Covid-19 cases and positive rates of infection over the past two weeks.  Newsom said he has accepted the resignation of Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the Department of Public Health, and looks forward to working with a new team that has resolved not to repeat past mistakes.

Although Newsom declined to say why Angell resigned, he said it was an appropriate decision and noted that Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, announced last Friday that a delay in communications about the problems would be investigated and people would be held accountable.

Newsom said he did not find out about the problems until last Monday afternoon, after he announced during his noon press conference that Covid-19 cases were trending downward. However, the Los Angeles Times reported that some local officials throughout California received communications from the state Department of Public Health the previous week about a problem with the CalREDIE data-tracking system.

While the infection data was a problem, Newsom said the state’s other data indicators on hospitalizations and death are trending positively.