DES MOINES, Iowa — Gov. Kim Reynolds has repeatedly touted TestIowa's success in the state and credits a mass testing program as one of the ways Iowa is standing out in its response to COVID-19.
But some Iowans getting tested through the $26 million initiative are calling it a mess.
Chris Reeves is a father to a teenage daughter who is an essential worker at a convenience store in central Iowa. He said that she started exhibiting coronavirus symptoms on May 14: fever, body aches, dizziness, and headaches. So she took the online TestIowa assessment to see if she qualified to get tested. At that time, it was only essential workers allowed to get a drive-through test. Reeves' daughter qualified for a test, and was scheduled for an appointment on May 19.
In the email above, you can see that the TestIowa program sent a message to Chris Reeves about his daughter's test. It reads, "Your results should be available within three business days."
Reeves said three days passed and he did not get any results for his daughter. Meanwhile, she was off from work and quarantined inside their Indianola home. She could not visit with friends, did not leave the home, and was following all of the recommended quarantine procedures.
"This poor girl, she's not able to go anywhere, and for a teenager, that's hard to do," said Reeves. "She's up in the air, her work doesn't know what's going on. They're probably expecting results within three days but that's not happening. The whole process was just a mess."
Reeves said he called the TestIowa hotline multiple times, trying to get answers about his daughter's test results. He was given the runaround, according to him, and was unable to get a straight answer from the nurses on the other end about where the test sample was and if his daughter was positive or negative for COVID-19. Reeves said it was important for him to find out.
"Because of where she works, when she's a clerk at a gas station, you know, she's in contact with a lot of people," said Reeves. "We wanted to get her tested because number one, we needed to know who might have been exposed so we can inform the convenience store and let them go through who might have been exposed to that. We don't want to be the people who are spreading this because we are being negligent...so it was super important to do this because it's the right thing to do and we need to follow through with things on our end and things didn't get followed through on their end very well."
Local 5 contacted Nomi Health, one of the out-of-state partners involved in TestIowa, about Reeves' case. A public relations representative said that at the time of Reeves' communication, the state was managing the call center. More recently, the call center has been set up by Nomi Health, and is staffed with registered nurses to handle inbound inquiries. Reeves informed Local 5 that he was told he was speaking to out-of-state nurses during his issues with TestIowa.
"The nurses there are very polite and they are working hard and I get that," said Reeves. "I'm sure they deal with hundreds of other people who are as frustrated as I am. But that's where I was getting absolutely no help from, I was calling, but I got zero results of my efforts of calling into that system. I still don't have any results from calling into that system."
One of the nurses on the TestIowa hotline told Reeves that his daughter should be tested again for COVID-19 as they were waiting for their results. So he scheduled a second appointment for June 2. The same day, he received an email informing him that his daughter's test it was unusable. Her test kit was part of a group of 111 damaged kits.
Reeves said that at that point, he had already scheduled the appointment for his daughter and went through with the second test. He said his main frustration with the entire program is the lack of clear communication and the time spent wondering what's happening with his daughter's test sample.
"The people behind these tests have a life that they have to get back to at some point," said Reeves. "When we send this message that everything is rosy, everything is great, everything is perfect, our testing system is running very efficiently and the reality that it isn't doesn't ever come to light. It's like we kind of sweep it under the rug because we don't want to paint a picture of reality, we want this perfect vision of how things are actually going. All I know is that from my experience, I think there's a mess there going on and I don't know a better way to describe that."
Reeves said he's also concerned about the nature of his daughter's case and all of the time that has passed waiting for her results and its impact on others.
"She's an essential worker, she's a clerk at a convenience store and she's been in contact with a lot of people and if she was positive, that means that we have to go back a lot of weeks to see who she was in contact with and that's a lot of possible exposures to know about," said Reeves.
Nomi Health told Local 5 that the average time to get results from TestIowa remains at three days.
"While the delay in results for the Reeves family was certainly unfortunate, the lab has worked diligently to resolve any and all backlog. It’s important to remember that in the midst of a pandemic there was a need for TestIowa to scale quickly, which we did safely. Nomi Health continues to work with our partners in the State of Iowa every day to improve our efforts and provide test results as quickly as possible. While our contract does not include obligations regarding how quickly the tests must be turned around, we do everything we can to set the State up to meet its testing goals." - Nomi Health