Missed doses, upload errors, delay times and software setbacks. The vaccine’s launch in California has been plagued by data problems, leaving the state unable to control how many doses of the life-saving COVID-19 vaccine are available at any given time.
The implications are far-reaching: Governor Gavin Newsom pushed to accelerate inoculations, in part because state data seemed to show that vaccine providers were sitting in doses, prompting the governor to threaten to take supplies from those who are not moving with fast enough. Now, county officials say they are concerned about data accuracy problems that will cause future distributions to be reduced based on erroneous conclusions of wrong numbers.
“We see that their data has been bad since the end of December,” said Fresno County supervisor Ernest Mendes.
After being pressured to make public more information about the counties’ progress in their vaccination efforts, the state published a panel to “make vaccine data transparent and accessible to all Californians.”
But the panel was so full of errors – including showing a handful of doses from counties in Arizona and other states – that Kat DeBurgh, executive director of Health Officers Assn. from California, said he initially told the state it should be withdrawn. Officials in smaller California counties also reported that the panel was drastically underreporting their doses.
“When it first came up, it was extremely inaccurate,” said DeBurgh, “but [the dashboard] it looks much better now. “
The accuracy of the state’s overall vaccine data is improving, which has helped California raise its national rating for administered doses, but the effort has been a manual and painstakingly slow process, said the Department of Public Health spokesman. California, Darrel Ng.
And the job is not over. Aimee Sisson, a public health official in Yolo County, told lawmakers during a hearing on Wednesday that upload errors caused the state’s database to underestimate vaccines administered in that county by nearly 30%.
“Neither the number received nor the administered number reported by the state corresponds to what we know to be true in Yolo County,” said Sisson. “The Yolo County team has been working with a state contractor to resolve the discrepancies, to no avail.”
With California warning providers that a failure to administer vaccines quickly enough could result in the state withdrawing doses, Sisson emphasized that the data the state trusted needed to be accurate.
“If the state uses its current data to determine future allocations,” said Sisson, “Yolo County could be penalized for what the state sees as an administration fee of 5`1%, but it is actually an administration fee. 74% ”.
The data problems made it appear that counties were slow to release doses to the public, Sisson said, prompting the state to look for new ways to speed up administration. Newsom said the state will sign a contract with the Blue Shield of California to review how the state distributes vaccines and improve data collection. That contract is due to be launched this week.
Some county officials have expressed concern about the redesign of the state’s vaccine delivery system, saying the problems are with collecting state data, not with the way doses are distributed.
“The system is not broken,” said Sisson. “It seems that it is because the doses administered are not showing up.”
Part of the problem with state data is the large number of vaccine providers who enter information using different types of software. Sometimes the errors and delays are a result of the software itself, some county officials said. At other times, the state’s immunization record indicates that the dose information has been loaded, but does not update the totals, according to county officials.
“I’m hearing from several local health departments in the Greater Sacramento region that they’re experiencing the same problem with missing doses [in the state registry]”, Said Sisson during the hearing. Dr. Paul Simon, director of science for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, added that “we are seeing the same thing here in Los Angeles.”
The California urban counties legislative defense organization wrote in a letter to Newsom this month noting that its member counties have been “significantly challenged by the lack of accurate data at the state level”.
Last month, Newsom praised how far the state had gone in increasing the number of daily vaccinations, but said that the “two, three day data delay … is killing us in terms of some of the national numbers”.
California’s significant vaccine data collection problems were first exposed when Newsom told Californians to “hold me accountable” for a goal of administering 1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in 10 days. After that period expired, state officials said that coding errors and data delays made it difficult to say whether Newsom achieved the goal.
The response to the state pandemic was hampered in other ways by deficient or outdated data systems, including the August discovery that a failure in a public health computer’s database made the numbers unreliable and led to questions about the actions taken to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Facing criticism from county officials over persistent vaccine data problems, Dr. Tomás Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health and a state public health officer, told lawmakers during the Wednesday hearing that there are an “incredibly intense focus” on “cleaning data, improving quality.”
“We have to improve the data,” said Aragón.