Just five days after the first TestIowa site in the state opened, questions have been raised regarding the accuracy of the tests performed on Iowans.
The state of Utah was the first to sign a contract with a group of local companies to launch TestUtah.com, a mass testing initiative. A report from The Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday revealed inaccuracies among the state data that showed "the rate of positive results among people tested at its sites is less than half of what it is for patients tested elsewhere in the state."
At her press briefing on Thursday, Gov. Kim Reynolds was asked about the report and whether she had reservations about the accuracy of the tests.
"We are in the process right now of validating the process," said Reynolds. "TestIowa is located at our state hygienic lab and I think TestUtah is located at a regional hospital. We decided to bring ours into the state hygienic lab through the University of Iowa. So we have the PCR testing in one area and the TestIowa in another...we are still in the validation process."
Reynolds said that the testing team at the lab is taking every precaution to validate the results. Local 5 spoke to one of the reporters on the story about TestUtah.com's potential inaccuracies. Erin Alberty said Iowans should be paying attention to what Utah is experiencing right now.
"Keep close track of the data that comes out from testing," said Alberty. "That's the only way to identify any kind of irregularities. It could be that in the Utah population, the symptomatic population that was tested by TestUtah simply did have half of the prevalence that the rest of the state had. That could be. There could be a problem with any number of joints in this process. We still don't know the reason for the discrepancy. But the reason that we know about the discrepancy is because the data was kept. So I think that if I were a citizen of Iowa or a patient or a journalist, my demand for the specific data would be pretty high."
The state of Iowa spent $26 million on a contract for TestIowa, which is slated to produce more than 540,000 coronavirus tests for Iowans. At its peak, TestIowa is projected to test 3,000 people a day. So far, less than 1,000 tests have been performed in total. Right now, the state has not provided information in the daily numbers report about the number of positive and negative TestIowa tests.
Medical experts in Utah, according to Alberty's reporting, have been raising concerns about the testing effort in the state. Alberty's reporting says according to state data obtained by The Tribune, TestUtah has reported test results for symptomatic patients separately — and even for those patients, positive results are far below those reported at other test sites in the state.
Alberty said transparency in the data reporting from the state is key.
"One thing about this data that is important to understand is that it's reported for asymptomatic and symptomatic patients separately," said Alberty. "TestUtah.com has been testing asymptomatic people unlike anybody in the state. In fact, over the objections of some people in the state health department. So that could naturally cause the number of positives to go down. However, even when you look at the symptomatic people that they've tested, the rate of positive results is about 2% and that's less than half of the rate of the positive results for all the other test sites in Utah."
According to Alberty, the reason for the discrepancy is not clear, but health officials and doctors in Utah have expressed concern over the testing practices at the sites and the sensitivity of the test being used.