California governor faces questions after key health official resigns
California’s governor faced a grilling from reporters on Monday over the resignation of one of the state’s top health officials, Sonia Angell, who stepped down without explanation on Sunday night after database errorsled to a backlog of thousands of coronavirus tests. Gavin Newsom refused to disclose the reason for Angell’s departure from her role as the director and state public health officer at the California department of public health, even after reporters pressed him at a briefing.
“She resigned. She wrote a resignation letter. And I accepted her resignation,” Newsom said. He added: “We’re all accountable in our respective roles for what happens underneath us. I don’t want to air any more than that.”
Angell often appeared during news conferences about California’s response to the pandemic alongside Newsom, who had appointed her to the dual roles. Her letter to staff, released by the California health and human services agency, did not give a specific reason for her resignation.
Mark Ghaly, the state’s health and human services secretary, said in a statement on Sunday: “I am grateful to Dr Angell for her service to the people of California. Her leadership was instrumental as Californians flattened
the curve once and in setting us on a path to do so again.”
It was Newsom’s first news briefing after his administration admitted last week that failures with the state database had led to a backlog of tests and an undercounting of Covid-19 cases.
The backlog would have skewed the positivity rates – the rate at which administered tests come back positive – which affects whether counties remain on the state monitoring list. Counties can only reopen certain businesses after they are off the monitoring list for a certain amount of time.
On Friday, Ghaly announced that a 25 July server outage, among other errors, caused a backlog of 250,000 to 300,000 records. At Monday’s briefing, he said that the state had been able to process the backlog over the weekend after it “nearly quadrupled” its capacity to process data.
Newsom put much of the blame on “large-scale information technology systems here in California that are decades and decades old”. He promised that his administration would begin to fix technological issues not just when it came to pandemic data collection, but “across the spectrum” in California.
There were 7,751 new cases in the state, Newsom said, an “accurate” number unaffected by the backlog.
The news comes as the state passes 10,000 coronavirus deaths. While it is unclear, given the data issues, how accurate the case numbers are, the state tally has total cases nearing 562,000, at a 14-day positivity rate of 22%.
Angell previously served as a deputy commissioner for the New York City department of health and mental hygiene and a senior adviser for global noncommunicable diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sandra Shewry, the vice-president of external engagement for California Health Care Foundation, will fill the role of acting health director, the health and human services agency said. Dr Erica Pan, who was recently appointed state epidemiologist, will be the acting state public health officer.