Slow COVID-19 test results skew area county's stats | Titus County judge is frustrated, says 'we should be doing better'

Titus County, Texas' recent upswings in coronavirus cases could be related to a poultry plant there, but delayed testing results and incomplete information make knowing with certainty difficult.

Mount Pleasant in Titus County is home to a Pilgrim's Pride poultry processing plant, and the county has seen alarming rises in its coronavirus case counts in recent weeks. But flawed testing and reporting protocols hamper pinning down whether those increases are due to contagion among plant employees.

State health agencies on May 19 and May 20 tested about 1,200 of the 1,400 employees of the plant in a quickly coordinated push requested by the plant's manager.

But results of those tests, along with those of two earlier community testing drives in Mount Pleasant, have been so slow to come back that they are of little value to officials' and residents' decision-making, County Judge Brian Lee said. It is not even clear whether the results, once returned, will specify which people were tested where.

Lee has been vocal about his frustration with the slow turnaround time and is seeking answers.

"Prompt information from testing is what we do testing for, so that we can take quick action to take care of ourselves or more importantly take care of others around us.

"It doesn't do us much good at all if it's postponed a week and beyond, and if you can't do better than that, you either need to find a different test facility or you need to put somebody else in charge of this," he said.

"I know this is new for everybody, but we should be doing better this far along, and we should understand the importance of timely information."

Slow result turnarounds account for wild swings in Titus County's official coronavirus case count, with days-long periods of little or no change followed by days when the count spikes up by triple digits. Results are coming back periodically, in large batches.

Those leaps in the county's case count do not mean that dozens of people have suddenly gotten sick. Results are so delayed that many of the patients the numbers represent may have recovered from infection before they even know they tested positive.

Adding to locals' uncertainty, Pilgrim's Pride is not making public how many of its employees have tested positive for the virus.

"Given the evolving nature of this situation, we are not attempting to report the number of impacted team members," a company spokesman said in an email.

Lee said he is satisfied with the safety measures Pilgrim's Pride has enacted at the plant, as well as the company's cooperation. The problem is with the information he has received from state agencies.

"What I need is a summary. Here's how many we tested, here's the number of positives, and here's the number of negatives at each of these events, so that we can tell the public here's what the results were. I want to know that, too. With every day that goes by, that answer becomes more and more meaningless," he said.

Titus County's case count rose by more than 20 from Thursday to Friday, moving from 443 to 464, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Sevier County's count rose by more than 30, from 131 to 162, according to the Arkansas Department of Health.

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