California county claims Newsom-backed company ‘fell flat on their face’ on COVID testing

A rural Northern California county’s health department is cutting ties with a private company the state hired to run its COVID-19 testing clinics, saying it was disorganized, didn’t test enough people and its workers were coughing on the job and jeopardizing everyone’s safety.

In a blistering letter sent to reporters on Wednesday, Lassen County officials said they had no choice but to stop working with OptumServe at its Susanville testing clinic because of problems the state and the company refused to address — ranging from mismanagement to testing inefficiencies to potentially spreading the coronavirus to county workers.

The most egregious example came at one of the testing clinics last week, wrote Dr. Kenneth Korver, the county health officer, and Barbara Longo, the county’s health and social services director.

“OptumServe staff were heard throughout the Public Health building coughing violently,” the county health officials wrote. “Several of our staff expressed concerns about the excessive coughing and possible illness transmission. OptumServe staff are exposed to the COVID-19 virus on a daily basis and yet travel from county to county without proper quarantine measures.”

In an emailed statement, the California Department of Public Health said the state’s COVID-19 Testing Task Force “strongly disagrees with the facts and characterization outlined in this letter,” including that OptumServe employees didn’t follow appropriate health protocols.

“Lassen County was provided direct assistance and engagement with OptumServe to remediate initial concerns,” the statement said. “The Testing Task Force was not given the same opportunity to address lingering concerns mentioned by Lassen County.”

The letter is the latest example of the ongoing tension between rural counties and the statewide edicts coming from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration during the pandemic.

Rural county officials have long chafed at Newsom’s COVID-19 restrictions and have pushed back on statewide business closures and other health edicts from Sacramento. County health officials also have complained of inefficient and confusing vaccination protocols and shortages, prompting Newsom to announce the state was contracting with Blue Shield to run the state’s vaccine program.

Given the problems Lassen County has had recently with OptumServe, officials are not particularly optimistic that the new Blue Shield vaccine program will go smoothly either, Richard Egan, the county’s chief administrative officer, told The Sacramento Bee.

“We’re concerned about the state’s ability to deliver that through a single vendor like they’re trying to do, rather than utilizing the infrastructure that’s already in place,” Egan said. “I don’t know what else to say about that, other than their track record speaks for itself as far as trying to do these things.”

Last spring, a month into the state’s COVID-19 crisis, Newsom announced California was contracting with OptumServe to establish an additional 80 community COVID-19 testing sites “focused on underserved communities” in an effort to tamp down the virus.

The state entered into at least two contracts with OptumServe’s parent company, Logistics Health, Inc., totaling $477 million for testing-related services, according to copies of the contracts posted by the Department of General Services.

To address the problem of not nearly enough tests being done early in the pandemic, Newsom created a testing task force in collaboration with insurance company Blue Shield.

CDPH said in its statement Wednesday the Testing Task Force strives to “provide equitable testing and access to populations with limited resources,” and the task force partnered with OptumServe to address concerns about people not being able to get tested because they didn’t have access to the internet, a translator if they didn’t speak English or they weren’t in close proximity to a testing site.

But Lassen County officials said they were worried that Newsom’s plan for centralized testing centers in the county would be problematic, and that local officials believed they had done a good job of testing for the virus in their small county of 30,573 people along the border with Nevada in northeastern California.

Egan said that since about May, the county has been offering its own testing in the sparsely populated county, testing about 300 to 400 people a week through another vendor.

About a month and a half ago, the state “decided they were going to do all the testing,” Egan said. “This is classic Gov. Newsom/state of California, if something’s not broken, fix it until it is. ... And of course, the state came in .... and fell flat on their face.”

In their letter, Korver and Longo said that when they asked the state to address the problems, their complaints weren’t heard.

“Our initial concerns with having a California centralized testing solution have not only proven to be true, but is turning out to be worse than what we had originally thought,” Korver and Longo wrote. They said officials with the health department and state testing task force have demonstrated no interest in resolving the issues.

That, they said, “is unconscionable.”

Lassen County claims to do it better

Their concerns went beyond presumably sick workers spreading the virus.

OptumServe employees did not wear proper personal protective gear and only hosted just one clinic a week, county officials said.

They also wasted taxpayer money by choosing to notify patients of negative results via costly overnight FedEx deliveries instead of text messages, calls or by email.

In its emailed statement, state officials countered that patients were given the option to receive their results by text, phone or email.

“In the event a patient does not have access to these methods, or does not answer the phone after 10 attempts, a next-day delivery letter is sent,” state health officials said.

But local health officials also said they were kept in the dark about when clinics were supposed to happen or when they were canceled, a claim state officials refuted.

“OptumServe has proven that they are not reliable to show up when scheduled nor provide appropriate advanced notice of their cancellation to the Lassen County Public Health or the public who have scheduled appointments,” Korver and Longo wrote.

In their statement, state officials said OptumServe said it makes 165 appointments available to Lassen County and accepts walk-ins.

But the county slammed OptumServe for its “beyond disappointing” testing numbers for each of its 12-hour testing clinics. The health officials said only 200 people got tested at the five 12-hour OptumServe testing clinics in January and February.

At one clinic, OptumServe didn’t show up because of a snowstorm and no one was tested, Egan said.

County-run clinics, meanwhile, regularly tested more than 100 people at each of the county’s three-hour clinics, which took only a quarter of the time as an OptomServe clinic, Korver and Longo wrote.

“As is typical of rural counties, we have been able to resolve the problem on our own and as such we were able to secure a COVID-19 testing solution at no cost to the state or our community members,” the letter reads.

“While the state of California has, under Governor Newsom’s leadership, implemented punitive measure of accountability to county public health departments and the public at large, no accountability measures are in place for the costly, ineffective OptumServe services in Lassen County.”