Florida Health Officials Sever Ties With Quest Diagnostics

TALLAHASSEE, FL — The Florida Department of Health and the Florida Division of Emergency Management announced Tuesday they are severing all ties with Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest purveyors of diagnostic testing in the United States, after officials accused Quest of failing to report nearly 75,000 coronavirus test results in a timely fashion.

"Quest’s failure to report nearly 75,000 results dating back to April means most of the data in today’s upload — while it will have historical significance — will have little impact on the status of the pandemic today," state officials said.

In a statement, Quest said it has performed and reported 1.4 million coronavirus tests in Florida, more than any other lab company. Quest stock prices opened at $111.50 per share on Tuesday and closed at $109.65.

"Quest Diagnostics takes seriously our responsibility to report laboratory data to public health authorities in a timely manner to aid pandemic response," company officials said. "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."

State officials said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the move in response to a batch of lab results submitted on Monday. State officials accused Quest of failing to follow Florida law.

“The law requires all COVID-19 results to be reported to DOH in a timely manner," DeSantis said in a statement. "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.”

With the Quest data in question, Florida will be reporting a one-day increase of 7,643 new cases of the virus on Tuesday compared to 3,773 new cases otherwise. The state will also be reporting a daily positivity rate of 6.8 percent compared to a daily positivity rate of 5.9 percent without the Quest data in question.

"Obviously, I think anyone should just take today's results and just put them aside because most of those were not recent results," the governor told reporters on Tuesday.

While the oldest results dated back to April, state officials said most of the data was more than two weeks old. State officials said everyone who tested positive for the coronavirus was notified of the result.

"Therefore, while significant, this unacceptable dump of test results is a data issue and does not impact the health of individuals or the spread of COVID-19 in Florida," officials said.

Quest insisted that the reporting issue has been resolved and stressed that it did not "affect or delay" the test results for health care providers or patients.

"We apologize for this matter and regret the challenge it poses for public health authorities in Florida," company officials said.

Quest Diagnostics reported revenue of $7.73 billion in 2019 and serves about half of the physicians and hospitals in the United States.