California Coronavirus Testing Task Force

In April, Governor Gavin Newsom established the California COVID-19 Testing Task Force to quickly and significantly increase the state’s COVID-19 testing capacity. The Task Force works to ensure that every Californian who needs a test can get one. The task force is co-lead by Dr. Gil Chavez with the California Department of Public Health and Dr. Bechara Choucair with Kaiser Permanente.

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Testing for COVID-19: PCR, Antigen, and Serology (8/6/20) (PDF)

The previous version of this document can be found here.

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.