The Florida Department of Health and the Florida Division of Emergency Management announced that they are severing all ties with Quest Diagnostics, the lab that performs its coronavirus testing, after it reported a backlog of nearly 75,000 test results dating back as far as five months.

The decision to stop working with Quest came under the direction of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The reporting backlog caused nearly 75,000 test results to be uploaded in a single day, significantly affecting the state’s coronavirus reporting numbers.

The Florida Department of Health said the reporting lag would have “historical significance” but “little impact on the status of the pandemic today.”

The alleged failure by Quest is a violation of Florida law, which requires COVID-19 reporting in a timely manner. Quest said all individuals that have been tested were notified of their results, but a dump of test result data would affect reporting results.

The Florida Department of Health said that the unacceptable backlog of test results is a “data issue and does not impact the health of individuals or the spread of COVID-19 in Florida.” The backlogged data, for the most part, was over two weeks old, with some test results dating back to April.

As a result of the data error, Florida is now reporting a 6.8% positivity rate, including cases reported by Quest. Without Quest data, the state has a 5.9% coronavirus positivity rate. Total new coronavirus cases for Aug. 31 were 3,773, and with Quest data were 7,643, the Florida Department of Health said.

“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.”

Florida has reported over 623,400 positive cases of the coronavirus, with over 11,100 COVID-19 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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