Austin officials say coronavirus case counts are deceptively slow because the labs rely on fax machines

• Austin's coronavirus case count is likely deceptively low, due to a lag caused by fax machines, one public health official warned county commissioners.
• Many testing providers are still using the obsolete technology to send each test record to Austin Public Health staff, who must manually input the information into a database, according to APH's interim medical authority.
• Texas has already required the use of digital databases to track cases, but Dr. Mark Escott told county commissioners many testing providers haven't yet made the switch.
• The lag in accurate data comes while Texas is struggling to tamp down on a major surge in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.

Austin's coronavirus outbreak likely much more severe than the city's deceptively low case count would indicate, because testing providers are using archaic fax machines to input data, one official told Travis County commissioners this week.

Many testing providers in the city are still using the obsolete machines to send each test record over to Austin Public Health staff, who then manually input the information into the database, APH's interim medical authority, Dr. Mark Escott, told the commissioners on Tuesday.

He told the commissioners that staff members are individually entering more than 1,000 faxed test results every day.

"It is causing a backlog, which is impacting people's notification that they're positive and it's impacting our ability to contact trace in a timely fashion," Escott said, according to the public radio station KUT. "Right now, it is not uncommon for us to have a week to 10 days between when a person is tested and when their case is entered into the system so they can be called."

Escott even told the commissioners he had personally spent all day Sunday inputting data himself.

"That's like a third-world technology. Most young people don't even know what a fax machine is anymore," one commissioner, Bridgid Shea, responded, according to KUT. "It is so crude, I am horrified to hear this."

Escott said that Texas officials have mandated using digital databases to track coronavirus cases, but many testing providers and doctors' offices haven't yet switched to a digital system.

Shea asked Escott to provide the county attorney with names of labs still using the fax machines "so we can look at enforcement actions if they're not following a state order," CBS Austin reported.

Austin's lag in collecting data comes while the entire state is struggling to tamp down on a major surge in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday even announced he would "pause" the reopening plan temporarily to halt the spread.

The state has seen record-high COVID-19 hospitalizations in recent weeks. As of Thursday, the state's health department had reported more than 125,000 cases and 2,249 deaths.