GUTHRIE COUNTY, Iowa — Guthrie County Health Services (GCHS) apologized via Facebook Sunday after five people received inaccurate COVID-19 test results last week.
Last Monday, the department tested a group individuals that had been exposed to a confirmed positive case, according to a Facebook post from GCHS.
In the post's comment section, GCHS said the tests were not done by TestIowa. They were completed at the West Central Valley High School by department staff.
Jotham Arber with GCHS told Local 5 the following Monday that an individual student tested positive. They had been in the weight room. Arber said they began contact tracing and found that over 40 people had direct contact with the individual.
"The superintendent asked if we would be willing to come down to the school in conjunction with the hospital nurses and our nurses and do that contact trace testing there at the school so we did that, and then we waited for the results," Arber said.
The department said they received the results the following Wednesday and Thursday.
Arber said that the results that staff later saw were a little bit different than what they had seen before.
Only one person in a family had tested positive, and Arber said that it's not unusual, but they've seen that if one person in a family gets infected then usually more in the group also get infected.
They reached out to the State Hygienic Lab (SHL) with their concerns. Around 4:30 p.m. Friday, the SHL notified GCHS that a "batch" of these tests weren't calibrated correctly.
The SHL reran the tests to determine their validity and found that four individuals that had tested positive were actually negative. One person that tested negative actually tested positive.
GCHS teamed up with Adair County Public Health to reach out to these individuals. All five individuals were asked to self-quarantine until August 1 since the incubation period for the virus is 14 days.
Arber said that the department worked with the high school to make sure the gym was closed until at least August 3.
GCHS apologized to the individuals for the inaccurate results and said that they "make every effort to scrutinize results to insure their validity."
"We felt like it was probably in everyone's best interest for us to release that to the public so that they knew exactly what was going on," Arber said.
"You know, we want to be very transparent and very accurate and consistent with what we're doing here at Guthrie. And so after having conversation with some Board of Health members we decided to go ahead and post, you know exactly what we had done and what had happened and how we were proceeding forward," said Arber.
Arber also said the SHL has been instrumental for the county's response to the virus.
"I would give them the most credit of any lab that I've ever worked with. When there is a discrepancy that they can identify, when we pose them questions about the results that we're getting, they're always very diligent in working to make sure that those results are coming back," Arber said.
Local 5 reached out to Gov. Kim Reynolds' office and the Iowa Department of Public Health for comment Sunday morning.