[Goose]

Despite the fact that case counts are mostly useless as a metric for several other reasons, this bug in the State's CalREDIE system is absolutely freaking infuriating. Even more infuriating is the fact that it has persisted for three weeks without an announcement, an estimated order of magnitude, or an ETA for the fix. 

In a sad and ironic twist, this comes at a time when the criteria for the county watch-list are based in part on case counts per capita. Decisions that influence the health and fate of 40,000,000 people, tens of thousands of local businesses, millions of employees, and more than 6,000,000 K-12 students supposedly hinge on this data. (Note that I am not trying to grind an axe for in-person instruction vs. distance learning.  I'm just pointing out the inanity of the whole situation.)
  
https://calmatters.org/health/2020/08/co...al-glitch/

“We’ve discovered some discrepancies,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s health and human services secretary in a press call. Data, he said, is “getting stuck” in the electronic system that feeds information from test labs to both the state and local public health departments.

May I suggest, as a fall-back plan, the use of carrier pigeons, slide rules and town criers to tabulate and report the results publicly? Or snail-mail, manual tabulation, and static HTML, at worst?   

Dr. Mark Ghaly, please have the engineers responsible for the CalREDIE system work 7 days/week until this bug is fixed.  I've seen occasional bugs on The CARDBoard fixed by unpaid community volunteers with a greater sense of urgency than this life-and-death matter seems to be receiving.

Sorry, I'm usually pretty calm and level-headed, but this really put me over the top. We aren't talking about an mRNA vaccine, a clinical trial or putting a man on the moon here.  In its simplest form, we're talking about communication of numbers (or individual results) so they can be ADDED TO A TOTAL. 
  
[/rant]

I share your incredulity that this could be happening in California six months into the mission. Many facilities report to CalREDIE electronically. We all know that data doesn't "get stuck" in a software system. It is worrisome when a public official says something like that. Either they are trying to dumb it down for the public or they are a pointy-haired boss type repeating what they were told. If the latter, yikes!
The problem may be the software doesn't throw errors when the input from a facility contains errors. It just silently skips reporting it. In any case, it should be pretty simple to trace down the problem. They should know what is wrong by now. The fact they don't seem to is very  concerning.
Many have lamented our problems on a national level, rightly IMHO. Here in California we now have something that all of us should be raising holy hell about. We are the home of Silicon Valley. I am sure there are piles of people available who can fix this kind of a problem. Yet here we sit, unable to know what is going on, because of a software problem in a system that has been running for at least six months. How is that even possible?

[Goose]

Despite the fact that case counts are mostly useless as a metric for several other reasons, this bug in the State's CalREDIE system is absolutely freaking infuriating. Even more infuriating is the fact that it has persisted for three weeks without an announcement, an estimated order of magnitude, or an ETA for the fix. 

In a sad and ironic twist, this comes at a time when the criteria for the county watch-list are based in part on case counts per capita. Decisions that influence the health and fate of 40,000,000 people, tens of thousands of local businesses, millions of employees, and more than 6,000,000 K-12 students supposedly hinge on this data. (Note that I am not trying to grind an axe for in-person instruction vs. distance learning.  I'm just pointing out the inanity of the whole situation.)
  
https://calmatters.org/health/2020/08/co...al-glitch/

“We’ve discovered some discrepancies,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s health and human services secretary in a press call. Data, he said, is “getting stuck” in the electronic system that feeds information from test labs to both the state and local public health departments.

May I suggest, as a fall-back plan, the use of carrier pigeons, slide rules and town criers to tabulate and report the results publicly? Or snail-mail, manual tabulation, and static HTML, at worst?   

Dr. Mark Ghaly, please have the engineers responsible for the CalREDIE system work 7 days/week until this bug is fixed.  I've seen occasional bugs on The CARDBoard fixed by unpaid community volunteers with a greater sense of urgency than this life-and-death matter seems to be receiving.

Sorry, I'm usually pretty calm and level-headed, but this really put me over the top. We aren't talking about an mRNA vaccine, a clinical trial or putting a man on the moon here.  In its simplest form, we're talking about communication of numbers (or individual results) so they can be ADDED TO A TOTAL. 
  
[/rant]

I share your incredulity that this could be happening in California six months into the mission. Many facilities report to CalREDIE electronically. We all know that data doesn't "get stuck" in a software system. It is worrisome when a public official says something like that. Either they are trying to dumb it down for the public or they are a pointy-haired boss type repeating what they were told. If the latter, yikes!
The problem may be the software doesn't throw errors when the input from a facility contains errors. It just silently skips reporting it. In any case, it should be pretty simple to trace down the problem. They should know what is wrong by now. The fact they don't seem to is very  concerning.
Many have lamented our problems on a national level, rightly IMHO. Here in California we now have something that all of us should be raising holy hell about. We are the home of Silicon Valley. I am sure there are piles of people available who can fix this kind of a problem. Yet here we sit, unable to know what is going on, because of a software problem in a system that has been running for at least six months. How is that even possible?