'It's shocking.' How inaccurate California death records obscure pandemic's true story Sacramento Bee 2 hrs ago Jason Pohl, Ryan Sabalow, and Phillip Reese, The Sacramento Bee May 3—When California looks back on the COVID-19 pandemic — the most significant health crisis in modern history, with tens of thousands of deaths so far — medical researchers will find some of the most basic details remarkably incomplete. Overwhelmed public health departments and front-line workers have for months failed to record accurate health histories for COVID-19 victims, a Sacramento Bee review of the state's internal pandemic death records found. The records show a Fresno County man in his 60s died of COVID-19 with an otherwise clean medical history. But that's not necessarily because he didn't have underlying conditions that contributed to his death; more likely, no one bothered to enter those conditions into a state disease surveillance database.