Quest data dump raises new concerns about whether COVID data is under-reported
For months, Florida officials have used test results as the foundation on which it has built a response to the coronavirus pandemic, but the revelation Tuesday that a lab that has supplied 22% of all of the test results has been withholding results for months has raised new concerns about whether the state has been under-reporting its data.
“It’s rank incompetence on the state and federal level,’’ said Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber after the Florida Department of Health announced it had severed ties to Quest Diagnostics because the laboratory violated state law and failed to report nearly 75,000 coronavirus tests. “No national testing program and absurd turnaround times on the state level means we are flying blind.”
Miami-Dade County has been the epicenter of Florida’s coronavirus crisis, and elected officials have relied on data compiled by the state and reported by private labs, many of them with state and federal contracts, to produce a real-time picture of how widespread the infection is in their communities.
For months, the Miami Herald and other news organizations have asked the Department of Health to be transparent about its testing backlog, as absent data could obscure the pandemic’s size and hamper efforts to decide when it’s safe to loosen restrictions.
Although the state pays the private labs for the services, and private labs complete more than 90% of Florida’s tests, the governor and state health officials never required private labs to report the backlog.
“This is the most egregious dump we have had,’‘ DeSantis said Tuesday at a media event in Jacksonville.
He said that Quest, which has conducted 1.4 million of the 6.4 million COVID-19 tests in Florida, has had some of the worst backlogs. DeSantis lamented how local officials were relying on the information to make decisions.
“This is not the way a lot of this information was designed to be used,’’ DeSantis said.
“We do want data but some of this data is just flawed,’‘ he said. “The problem is when you’re sloppy with it, it ends up impacting people’s lives and, again, it shouldn’t be that way.”
There were other data delays
This isn’t the first time DeSantis has complained about an unexpected spike in test results because of a data dump from the testing companies.
Three weeks ago, the Department of Health announced that Niznik Labs of Miami Gardens reported more than 4,000 case results that dated as far back as June 23, skewing the data in the Aug. 12 report.
In May, a spike of about 550 cases of COVID-19 in Miami-Dade County was blamed on a backlog of three-week-old test results from an undisclosed testing site.
And in Bradenton, after delays with test results at a state-run lab at a Home Depot, the state stopped using Quest and began using Mako Medical labs instead.
“The switch was made on July 20 to provide faster results for those being tested at our site, which is always a priority of the state,’’ Florida Division of Emergency Management spokesperson Jason Mahon told the Bradenton Herald in late July.
On Tuesday, Mahon said that Quest Diagnostics “was only being utilized at a limited number of state-supported sites” and would be replaced with other lab providers.
He said the state uses several labs at more than 60 state-supported testing sites, “and we have no concerns with transitioning the few sites that utilized Quest to labs that will be able to step in and provide COVID-19 testing while meeting expectations and following Florida law.”
Tougher regulations coming
Molly McKinstry, a deputy secretary at the Agency for Health Care Administration, said Tuesday that the federal government is now drafting regulations that increase the penalties for failing to report test results in a timely fashion.
The regulations will apply to private testing labs, healthcare facilities that use point-of-care devices as well as hospital labs, and are likely to include new penalties for failure to report results in a timely fashion, she said in Tuesday phone call with hospital officials.
“Please make sure that that reporting is happening timely to the Department of Health,’’ McKinstry said. “It’s incredibly important to monitor the impact of cases in our state, among other things.”
However, it is unclear how much longer the state will be using its state-supported testing sites. DeSantis on Monday indicated he is shifting strategies and is now discouraging people who have no symptoms from getting tested.
Meanwhile, Gelber, a former state legislator, is frustrated that the state has not established a more reliable testing program.
“Obviously discounting these tests creates its own skewing of the true test results whatever they may be,’’ he told the Herald/Times. “If people are upset that our economy has been unable to reopen as fully as it should, the blame falls squarely on those responsible for assembling this inept response.”
Jessica DeLeon of the Bradenton Herald, Daniel Chang of the Miami Herald, and The News Service of Florida contributed to this report.
This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 7:47 PM.