The Trump administration and Congress do not have a monopoly on incompetence.
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https://nyti.ms/3andKig:
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In recent weeks, California’s coronavirus response seems to have accelerated its descent from national model to chaotic scramble, as the state emerged as the center of the pandemic.
The state’s reopening dissolved into a confusing patchwork of restrictions that differed county by county. Observers have criticized a lack of foresight about a predictable surge in the Central Valley, where low-wage workers in largely Latino communities have been vulnerable as they continue to report to their essential jobs.
And a week ago, state officials said that a technical issue with its disease data-tracking system threw into question what Gov. Gavin Newsom had at first said was an encouraging — if slight — downward trend in skyrocketing cases.
The glitch, according to the state, caused almost 300,000 records to disappear from the system, although it was unclear how many of those were coronavirus cases and how, precisely, it affected the counts.
Late on Sunday night, Dr. Sonia Angell, the state’s public health director, abruptly resigned.
On Monday, in his first virtual news conference of the week, Mr. Newsom would not answer repeated questions about whether Dr. Angell had been asked to resign over her department’s handling of the data problems, though he and Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s secretary of health and human services, both said the department’s leadership was changing.
“She wrote a resignation letter and I accepted her resignation,” Mr. Newsom said. “We are all accountable in our respective roles for what happens underneath us.”
In a statement on Sunday night, Mr. Newsom thanked Dr. Angell for her work to “help steer our public health system during this global pandemic, while never losing sight of the importance of health equity.”
Dr. Ghaly, who has been a regular presence at the governor’s Covid-19 briefings, also emphasized Dr. Angell’s focus on health equity.
“She has worked tirelessly for all Californians,” he said in a statement.
In her resignation letter, Dr. Angell — who, early in the pandemic, spoke about the state’s efforts to identify disparities in the pandemic’s toll on Latino and Black communities in particular — did not say why she was stepping down, effective immediately.
“Since January, when we got word of repatriation flights arriving from Wuhan, China, our department has been front and center in what has become an all-of-government response of unprecedented proportions to Covid-19,” she said in an email to her staff. “Not one of our staff has gone untouched by the changes that have occurred. Not in our professional lives or our personal lives.”
Dr. Angell added that she was proud to have served as the first Latina in the role, which she held for less than a year. She signed the note, “In Solidarity.”
State officials said that Sandra Shewry, a veteran public health official, would be appointed as acting director of the department, while Dr. Erica Pan would take on the role of acting state public health officer.
The governor on Monday vowed to quickly overhaul what he described as the state’s outdated information technology systems, which he blamed for not just the testing data snafu, but also for a staggering backlog of unemployment claims.
“We’re not going to just use this as an episodic issue — Band-Aid this,” he said. “It took us decades to get into this place, but we’re now accountable.”
State officials have said that the data glitch didn’t affect hospitalization numbers, which have been on the decline.
Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering the scale of the pandemic in the state: As of Monday, California had recorded 10,378 deaths related to the virus, third in the nation after New York and New Jersey, according to The Times’s database.
In a related story yesterday, Santa Cruz county public health officer Gail Newel, who is taking a lot of heat as Santa Cruz has gone from being one of the safest coastal counties in the state to the site of a recent surge, said she is increasingly questioning her ability to curb the spread of Covid-19 with a state leadership that is sometimes inconsistent and a population that, is increasingly “not willing to be governed.”
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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