Tuesday, September 01, 2020

Governor Ron DeSantis Fires Quest Diagnostics For Failure To Report COVID Tests Timely

Today, at the direction of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the Florida Department of Health and the Florida Division of Emergency Management will be severing all ties with Quest Diagnostics after Quest’s alleged failure to follow Florida law and report all COVID-19 results in a timely manner.

"Quest’s failure to report nearly 75,000 results dating back to April means most of the data in today’s upload – while it will have historical significance – will have little impact on the status of the pandemic today," said a press release from the Department of Health.

Today, the Florida Department of Health reported at 11 a.m., there are 7,569 new positive COVID-19 cases, out of those, 3,870 were results older two weeks, some dating back to April, per a delay in reporting from Quest Diagnostic Labs, said the DOH.

Quest Diagnostics is a large, nationwide lab that provides testing at private sites, as well as performing limited testing through the state. Based in New Jersey, the company has 47,000 employees. with it's stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and trading down 2% this morning.

Upon announcing this action, Governor DeSantis said, “The law requires all COVID-19 results to be reported to DOH in a timely manner. To drop this much unusable and stale data is irresponsible. I believe that Quest has abdicated their ability to perform a testing function in Florida that the people can be confident in. As such I am directing all executive agencies to sever their COVID-19 testing relationships with Quest effective immediately.”

Quest states that "We have reported results of approximately 13.2 million COVID-19 molecular diagnostic tests to patients and providers in the United States. We enter the third consecutive week of reporting an average turnaround time for these tests of 2 days across all populations and 1-2 days for our priority population, which includes hospitalized patients, individuals in long-term care (such as nursing homes), and pre-surgical patients.

"We now have capacity to provide 200,000 COVID-19 molecular diagnostic tests a day. Our increased capacity strengthens our ability to service potential surges in demand heading into the Fall flu season." 

Officials for the state have not indicated a breakout of the test dates or how they will get tests results from other companies, but Monday night, August 31, the Governor’s office was informed that nearly 75,000 tests from Quest, dating as far back as April, were to be entered into the DOH COVID-19 monitoring system. 

The Governor has been attempting to manipulate testing reporting results for several months, critics say, in order to make the results show positive COVID percentages as low as possible, mostly by including multiple test results from any individual being tested more than once, instead of reporting positive results from only each individual. Reporting results from multiple testing of the same individuals makes the results appear lower than they actually are. Actual positivity results are reportedly about twice as high as the state is reporting.

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