This started as a week of positive news, finally, in California’s battle with the coronavirus. After nearly two months of skyrocketing cases, hospitalizations and deaths, there were the first signs that the COVID-19 spike was ebbing and new cases were beginning to decline.
But by Friday, state officials were still scrambling to fix a coronavirus-tracking database that had suffered glitches, rendering the numbers inaccurate. It came as the state marked another sober milestone: 10,000 deaths from the virus.
The breakdown in the electronic collection of coronavirus test results has further rattled confidence in how the state is responding to the coronavirus in recent months. It’s a big turnaround from the spring, when California was hailed as a model for the nation.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s health and human services director, said Friday that between 250,000 and 300,000 results have not been uploaded to the database. Some of those are either duplicate records or tests for other diseases the department keeps track of. And to this point, the vast majority of coronavirus results have been negative.
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