Governor Ron DeSantis has decided that the Florida Department of Health and the Florida Division of Emergency Management will no longer work with Quest Diagnostics. The reason is due to Quest Diagnostic’s failure to report all COVID-19 results in a timely manner.
According to the Florida Department of Health, Quest Diagnostics failed to report nearly 75,000 test results dating back to April. Most of the cases were over two weeks old. The state was informed of the missing data on Monday night.
Quest Diagnotics told the state that all positive cases were notified of their results and there was no major concern for the health of Florida residents.
“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,” DeSantis said in a press release.
Without the Quest Diagnostics data, the state calculated the positivity rate for Monday’s cases would be at 5.9 percent. With the cases, the positivity rate would be at 6.8 percent.
Quest Diagnostics has released a statement saying they take their responsibility to report lab data seriously.
“Due to a technical issue, our reporting of a subset of public health COVID-19 test data to the Florida Department of Health was delayed. This subset involves nearly 75,000 of the approximately 1.4 million COVID-19 tests we had performed and reported to the state,” the statement said. “We apologize for this matter and regret the challenge it poses for public health authorities in Florida. The issue has since been resolved. Importantly, the issue did not affect or delay reporting of test results to providers and patients.”
Quest Diagnostics goes on to say that they will remain open to working with the state Department of Health to provide testing that meets the needs required for patient care and public health response.
Cox Media Group
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