State: 75 Putnam residents have been tested for COVID-19

On Friday, the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) added a new set of data to its COVID-19 reporting.

In addition to county-by-county positive cases and deaths, the ISDH website also shows how many tests have been administered to residents of each county.

According to the data, 75 Putnam County residents had been tested for COVID-19 as of the end of Thursday.

This goes along with 13 positive cases and one death in the county.

However, tracking positive cases, let alone all tests, has not been an easy task, making any numbers reported on such data preliminary at best.

The ISDH website actually gives a disclaimer with the reporting of the statewide testing numbers: “Number of tests is provisional and reflects only those reported to ISDH. Numbers should not be characterized as a comprehensive total.”

Putnam County Hospital CEO Dennis Weatherford, who is serving as public information officer for the local response to the COVID-19 pandemic, gave a further explanation for why such data is considered provisional.

For one thing, the ISDH report is a conglomeration of data points from various places, including the ISDH lab, the Eli Lilly lab and other outside testing labs.

“We use three different sources of testing currently for patients we test in our community,” Weatherford said.

When a local health care provider issues a test, the first option is to send it directly to the ISDH. However, if the ISDH lab is full, the next step is to send it to Lilly.

Beyond this, there are occasions in which the both the ISDH and Lilly labs are busy or submission to them is not possible.

In these cases, local officials send the tests to outside reference labs.

Regardless of the specific lab, all positive tests are required to be reported to the state. The same is not required of negative tests.

“They are definitely catching all of the positives, wherever the test is performed,” Weatherford said. “I can’t say whether they get all the negatives that are performed for us from the reference labs.”

When patients are tested outside their own county, the same issues apply, with the added complication of further tracking back to the home county.

“We have some questions out to the ISDH as to how that data point is established,” Weatherford said of the county-level testing data.

Weatherford worries that in releasing the provisional county testing data, the state is giving an incomplete picture of how many tests have been administered.

“I don’t want our general public to look at that and think, ‘Oh, my goodness, that’s all we’ve tested?’” Weatherford said. “While we don’t know the exact number, we believe it’s higher than what is shown there.”

ISDH has been reporting numbers of tests statewide since setting up a webpage devoted to the COVID-19 pandemic (https://coronavirus.in.gov/), along with statewide and county-by-county numbers of cases and deaths.

Even reporting on positive cases can be difficult due to differing lag times in test results from various labs.

With negative tests, there are even more variables.

Still, the new testing data can be informative in terms of seeing how tests have been administered across the state. For example, Marion County, with the state’s highest population and most positive cases, has unsurprisingly also had the most tests administered at 7,055.

Meanwhile, Ohio County, with the state’s lowest population and just one positive case, has had just four tests administered.

At the micro level, though, it’s uncertain how clear of a picture this new data is painting.