California Coronavirus Testing Task Force

Governor Newsom has announced a COVID-19 Testing Task Force, a public-private collaboration working group with stakeholders across the state to quickly and significantly boost California’s testing capacity. The Testing Task Force’s priority is to ensure California has enough capacity and supplies to administer a significantly greater number of tests statewide. The Testing Task Force is co-chaired by Dr. Charity Dean, Assistant Director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), and Blue Shield of California President and CEO Paul Markovich.

Collaboration across the state is an integral part of the Testing Task Force, and the following efforts are part of this ongoing work:

Collaboration with the University of California, San Diego and University of California, Davis to establish high-volume testing hubs.
Collaboration with Stanford Medicine as they launch the first serology test invented in California.
Collaboration with Abbott Laboratories to deploy the first rapid point-of-care test across 13 health care delivery systems and 75 sites.

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Serology Testing Indications 5-5-2020 (PDF)

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Finding a Testing Site

Testing Task Force Goals

The Testing Task Force is working to ensure that Californians who need COVID-19 testing have access to tests and is evaluating current sites for specimen collection across the state to determine where additional sites are needed. Additional goals of the Testing Task Force include:

Ensuring California has lab capacity to rapidly turn around test results and increase capacity strategically to meet demand;
Improving the supply chain to ensure that California can both collect samples and evaluate results without delay;
Enabling new, high-quality tests to launch in California as soon as possible;
Improving our ability to accurately track and evaluate COVID-19 testing capacity, results and reporting; and
Building the workforce necessary to meet our testing goals.

Together with stakeholders across California, the Testing Task Force is working to increase the state’s testing capacity fivefold by April 30, 2020. In conjunction with partners, the Testing Task Force is also establishing testing capacity to help identify persons immune to COVID-19 to better understand the true community epidemiologic curve across the state.

How Testing Data is Tracked

Most local health departments report COVID-19 test results via the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange (CalREDIE), a system managed by CDPH. Labs and local health departments are required to report both positive and negative COVID-19 results. This daily, point-in-time data is collected in CalREDIE each afternoon and reported to the public the following day. The Task Force is working to that data reported remains uniform and timely.