WASHINGTON CO. OFFICIALS EXPRESS FRUSTRATION WITH LACK OF INFORMATION ON NEW COVID-19 CASES
Washington County leaders are frustrated with the state’s procedures for reporting COVID-19 cases and timelines for returning test results, saying they lead to a lack of information on where new cases are coming from.
Monday, Washington County reported 16 new COVID-19 cases, the county’s highest single-day increase since April. However, County Judge John Durrenberger and Emergency Management Coordinator Bryan Ruemke both said they have not received any additional information on these cases as to where they are connected to, with long wait times for returned tests and lack of patient interviews contributing to a potentially inaccurate picture of the state of COVID-19 in the community.
Durrenberger said, with the limited information available, he is led to believe that the newest confirmed cases come from the general public, considering patients under the age of 40 make up a large percentage of the new cases. Ruemke provided similar comments, saying right now he cannot draw lines to any kind of “cluster” at a specific facility and that these cases appear to be just “sporadic and random”.
Durrenberger and Ruemke said there is no way to know when testing was done for the latest cases, as the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) does not provide a time frame of when the tests were performed. Ruemke said the date that cases are added into the county’s “line list” of positive cases is just a date, and does not necessarily indicate the cases are all from the same time frame. He said the results are “not real-time”.
Ruemke said the DSHS previously took about 24 hours from the time it got test results to vet them and put them on the line list. That process, according to Ruemke, now takes at least three to four days. In addition, he said the state used to interview positive cases upon receiving positive lab reports to get additional information from patients. He said the state’s process now involves just getting the results and going off whatever information it has on a patient to put on a line list, which can lead to cases being attributed to the wrong counties if the information on file is incorrect.
The two also criticized the state’s lack of timeliness in returning test results to patients, pointing specifically to the recent mobile test collection days held at the Washington County Fairgrounds. Durrenberger said it has taken as long as 15 days for results to come back from those test collections, with Ruemke noting that while many times the long wait leads to a negative test result, people naturally want quick reassurance that they are negative. Durrenberger believes the state is testing more people than it can process at a time, saying it has gotten “snowed under”. In addition, Durrenberger bemoaned the sluggish reporting of patients that have died, saying the county only recently received word of a local patient that passed away in May.
Ruemke said he knows the DSHS is working to solve the problems it has, and that nobody foresaw this pandemic happening, but cannot say for sure that the state was prepared, at least not for a pandemic of this magnitude. He said he does not know how to fix the situation, but both he and Durrenberger called it “very frustrating”.