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Recently, claims of the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) reporting multiple new cases of COVID-19 for positive individuals who have taken more than one test have been spreading across social media.
However, LDH officials say that’s not how it works.
“If somebody tests positive once, that’s one positive. If they test positive again, it’s still the initial positive,” said Sean Ellis, LDH Public Information Officer. “So when we say one million people, that’s one million separate individuals.”
This afternoon during Gov. John Bel Edwards’ COVID-19 update, Dr. Alexander Billioux, Assistant Secretary of Health for the Office of Public Health at LDH, said the reports of repeated cases are not credible.
“I think what we’ve seen in the last week is across social media a campaign to try to erode public trust in testing in general,” he continued. “I think those stories are a good example of that.”
“These kinds of stories I think are insidious and pernicious and quite frankly, scary from a public health standpoint ‘cause I don’t think that there is a widespread effort to raise numbers,” he later added. “We certainly have nothing to gain from that.”
What there is a risk of, Billioux explained, is people feeling that testing doesn’t work, or not wanting to get tested. “Testing is the key beginning point to understanding your risk and the community’s risk for COVID, having people know that they need to isolate, take care of their health, and for people who might have been exposed to that individual know that they also need to quarantine.”
Billioux specifically addressed the report released by the Red River Parish Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness this week, claiming that LDH reported the parish’s positive count at 96, when it was really at 58 because of multiple tests for the same positive individuals.
“If an individual gets tested more than once to get a negative result in order to return to work and that test comes back positive that test is showing up as another COVID count number not back to the same individual,” the agency wrote. “Sometimes these individuals take 1 to 4 test and have multiple positives come back and those test results are being counted in the list as a new person.”
Early in the epidemic, many states — including Louisiana — began sharing information specifically with first responders, Billioux said, so individuals responding to calls would know if the person they interacted with posed a risk of spreading the coronavirus.
That data was not for someone to just “pour over and look at,” he said, and it was specifically to be entered into that system so that as somebody is dispatched, they would only have visibility to the person that they’re responding to.
That practice is continued to this day, Billioux said. “What I believe we’re seeing from the Red River Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness is looking at their data, they feel that there are duplicate cases,” he said. “I think it’s probably just a misunderstanding on their part.”
“We’ve changed the way that we give that data. We now only provide new cases,” Billioux continued. “I think in their posting, they noted that they’re looking at a cumulative list– they’re not.”
The LDH automatedly and manually deduplicate and “move out of state people, out of state and move out of parish people, out of parish every day,” Billioux said.
At the time Red River Parish Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness made the post, the parish did have 96 cases, and LDH was not able to corroborate the lower number of 58, he said.
Billioux said he believes LDH has a call with Red River officials early next week to “hopefully have a productive discussion.”
“I know that there’s many questions about that data,” he continued. “But again, I go back to the importance, especially as public officials, of giving sound public information in the middle of a pandemic and not raising undue concern.”
Terrebonne Parish officials attempted to be reached before press time.
