CalREDIE under-reporting all California Covid-19 cases for past “few weeks” | Hacker News Reader

CalREDIE under-reporting all California Covid-19 cases for past “few weeks”

sccgov.org

24 pointschrispeel7 comments

As somebody down on the ground on this: it's true. The backend on CalREDIE is a message passing system common in HIEs called Rhapsody. It's essentially a capacity problem, and there is no real redundancy for messages that got dropped, so the issue was probably always present but didn't really become noticeable until the recent surge. The state has escalated the problem to the vendor, since a large number of California counties rely on it.

Thanks. I have questions:

* No redundancy!! Can you get back to the labs with the information you have to create a second route so that tests who get dropped (WTF!) can somehow be passed on to the state and county?

* Is there any special handling of positive cases? I.e. to make sure they aren't dropped?

* Even in early July in Santa Clara County some tests come to the county something like 12 days after the test (specimen collection) occurred. Is the problem you're describing separate from this?

* Santa Clara County seems to have had the number of new cases each day[1] drop by a half around July 20; since the number of tests[2] also dropped by a half, it seems reasonable that the true number of cases in the county has been increasing for the entire month. Does this sound right to you?

* When was this noticed?

EDIT: more questions, refs

* Is this [3] the Rhapsody you refer to?

* Are you connected to the state or a county?

[1] https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard-cases.a...

[2] https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard-testing...

[3] https://www.lyniate.com/rhapsody/

Yes, I believe that's the product. The exact failure is in electronic lab reporting. The state is already contacting labs to work on an alternate conduit to get the backlog dealt with, but it will need a lot of manual entry. Most of the counties relied on the state system because it was much less work to do so and cases had to be entered into the system anyway. In the meantime the only cases reported locally are the minority that do make it, or are manually entered from physician reports and small outfits not required to participate in ELR. I don't know the situation personally in Santa Clara County, so I couldn't say.

Johns Hopkins CCSE data has been showing a weird abrupt flattening of California 7-day rolling averages beginning 3 weeks ago, between 7/11 & 7/21, for both cases and deaths. [0] [1] It looks more believable if you show the daily raw counts and mentally smooth it. [2] [3]

[0] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states&...

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states&...

[2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states&...

[3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states&...

A few more details today from the state [1] with a news reports nationally [2] and locally [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGQXuC85CJY

[2] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/07/...

[3] https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/07/california-governor-s...

Florida seems to be having the same problem [1]. Looking at a graph of the number of cases [2], I see that FL and CA maxed out at roughly the same ceiling. I wonder if FL is also using the same buggy tool.

[1] https://twitter.com/euromaestro/status/1290798878401482752

[2] https://covid19chart.org/#/?stat=daily&norm=none&include=CA%...

Would these unexplained glitches have anything to do with Trump requiring less reported Covad cases?

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