More than technical difficulties

Days after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s health and human services secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, vowed to “hold people accountable” for a breakdown that left the state in the dark about its coronavirus resurgence, a top public health official resigned late Sunday. The apparent swordfalling may satisfy the Newsom administration’s momentary need to extricate itself from what the governor called “a little bit of trouble,” but it will take much more than a bureaucratic shuffle to right the state’s response to the pandemic.

Dr. Sonia Angell, the state health officer and Public Health Department director, resigned after Newsom and Ghaly acknowledged that technical lapses had left hundreds of thousands of reported coronavirus test results out of the state’s tally, effectively blinding state and local officials to the scope and course of the contagion for weeks. Ghaly said Monday that the missed reports were recovered over the weekend and that a new reporting system was in the works. Newsom professed confidence that the “trend lines continue to look favorable” even after the correction, with new cases, positive test rates and hospitalizations falling over the past two weeks.

The governor said he had been unaware of the problem a week earlier when he presented what turned out to be inaccurate data as cause for hope that the virus’ spread was abating.

He and Ghaly were studiously vague about the reasons for Angell’s departure after less than a year in the administration, but it was clear that they were offering her up as a political sacrifice to the data disaster without quite saying so.

“The buck stops with me,” Newsom said twice. And yet when reporters pressed him to explain the public health director’s exit, he added, “We’re all accountable in our respective roles for what happens underneath us.”

Scapegoating the nearest publicly employed M.D. for an inept response to the pandemic is not a novel approach. State and local health officials have faced abuse and burnout nationwide, and at least 48 of them have quit or been fired since the coronavirus struck, according to a count by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press. They have included Angell’s former second in command, who resigned in June, and at least seven ranking county health officials in California.

The wear and tear on the public health bureaucracy reflects our elected leaders’ systematic dodging of responsibility for the devastation. President Trump has tussled with his own health advisers in typically vulgar and public terms while ignoring their guidance and abdicating responsibility to the nation’s governors. Newsom outsourced key decisions to local officials ahead of the spike in new infections. The public health bureaucrat is all too often the last official available to take a difficult stand.

In the absence of another commander in chief, Newsom and other governors presiding over major outbreaks will have to make some truly buckstopping calls to contain the runaway pandemic. That means keeping most schools, offices and other highrisk activities from resuming, further emptying prisons and preventing spread in nursing homes and other institutions, and thereby flattening the curve until the state can effectively test and trace outbreaks.

As alarming as it was, the state’s lapse in counting tests was a minor problem compared with its persistent inability to conduct enough of them to catch the asymptomatic cases that fuel the contagion. Newsom said Monday that the 172,000 tests reported Sunday represent “progress being made,” which they do, but the state remains a long way from the ready and rapid diagnosis needed to restore any semblance of normalcy.