California is dramatically undercounting its vaccinations, county officials say
California’s vaccine data system is dramatically undercounting shots administered by counties, officials say, a problem that could hurt planning for the state’s immunization campaign.
On Feb. 5, Yolo County had used 74% of its COVID-19 vaccines, but the state’s dashboard said the county had only used 51%, the county’s health officer Dr. Aimee Sisson told lawmakers during a Wednesday hearing. California has been barraged by criticism for a botched vaccine rollout.
But Sisson said that, at least at the county level, vaccines are being administered much faster than the data reflects.
“Local health departments are putting doses into arms as quickly as we receive them,” she told lawmakers. “The system isn’t broken. It just looks like it is because doses being administered aren’t showing up.”
It’s a concern echoed by other local health officials in recent weeks. In an interview with The Sacramento Bee, California State Association of Counties executive director Graham Knaus said counties in his organization have found the state data is missing hundreds of thousands of administered doses. At the hearing, Sisson said other Sacramento-area counties are seeing similar errors. Los Angeles County’s top science official Dr. Paul Simon said it’s happening in his county, too.
Dr. Tomás Aragón, director of California’s Department of Public Health, acknowledged the data errors Sisson and Simon testified about and said the state is working to correct them.
“Over the past several weeks this has been an incredibly intense focus for us, cleaning up the data, improving the quality, making sure that every dose gets administered,” Aragón said. “Without good data, we’re not going to have visibility on achieving any of our goals.”
Newsom has also acknowledged the data problems — at one point, he said the numbers were three days behind — and lamented that it shows California as doing worse than it really is.
When asked for clarity about Sisson’s comments at the Wednesday hearing, California Department of Public Health spokesman Darrel Ng said the state is looking into the county totals, but said the department believes the state’s current overall vaccination total is accurate.
“The state is working closely with counties to determine if any issues exist, the root cause for potential issues and reconcile vaccine data managed by the state and the counties,” he said in a written statement. “At this point, there are no discrepancies with the total number of vaccines administered statewide, but we are looking into the issues they’ve described.”
It’s part of what the state aims to fix about the rollout with its new agreement with insurance company Blue Shield, which is scheduled to take over the state’s vaccine distribution next week. As part of the agreement, Blue Shield will be tasked with overseeing the state’s vaccine allocation data.
Anthony Wright, executive director of consumer advocacy group Health Access, said in an interview last week that it’s still not clear if early reports that California ranked toward the bottom of the country in terms of vaccine allocation were accurate because of problems with the state’s vaccine tracking.
“At best, we had incomplete data,” he said. “There’s some evidence that it’s not that we were last, it’s just that we didn’t know, which I’m not sure is a better answer.”
Knaus said the counties are working with the state to try to understand the data problems, and at this point have no way to know whether the statewide total is accurate.
“We just haven’t seen an accurate set of comprehensive data to make a determination one way or anther,” he told The Bee on Thursday. “We’re actively working to do exactly that and hope we get that critical data from the state.”
Yolo County knows the state data is wrong because it has physical paperwork showing the number of doses it has administered, Sisson said. She said when the county uploads data to the state’s immunizations database, it receives confirmation that the data has been received, but then it doesn’t show up in the state’s tallies.
The data errors could be a major problem if the state uses its data to determine how much vaccine to give to each county, she said. Right now, she told lawmakers Yolo has the ability to vaccinate far more people than it has doses, despite state data that inaccurately says the county has only used half its supply.
“I’m particularly concerned that the discrepancies will result in reduced future allocations,’ she said. “If the state uses its current data to determine future allocations, Yolo County could be penalized for what the state sees as an administration rate of 51%, but is actually an administration rate of 74%.”
Even if the data is painting a grimmer picture than reality, lawmakers at the hearing said the state’s vaccine rollout still has noticeable problems.
Assemblyman Jose Medina, D-Riverside, said he recently talked with an 86-year-old resident from his district who has been unable to get an appointment or even figure out where to get an appointment, despite being able to use a computer and having the time to try to figure it out. Medina said it’s a problem echoed by many of his district’s older residents, who are most in need of vaccines.
“What we are doing now is not working,” Medina said. “What I’ve seen so far in this rollout has been nothing short of chaotic.”
This story was originally published February 11, 2021 at 3:16 PM with the headline "California is dramatically undercounting its vaccinations, county officials say."