Local officials reported one new positive COVID-19 test result Friday, but also announced that all 39 positive results from Snyder Oaks reported Tuesday — as well as eight positive results among local first responders announced Monday — were all false positives.
Scurry County currently has 24 active positive cases and two recovered, totaling 26 local positive cases so far this year.
“It has been a crazy week,” County Judge Dan Hicks said Friday. “Some answers we’ve been trying to get, we haven’t been able to get. We finally have some of those answers. Some answers we still don’t have.”
The false positives stemmed from testing that was conducted on May 25 as part of an initiative by Governor Greg Abbott to test Texas’ nursing homes. A team from the state tested the residents of Snyder Oaks, and local officials requested that they also test local fire and law enforcement personnel after a county employee stationed at the law enforcement center tested positive.
“Sometime in the evening of June 1, Snyder Oaks received directly the results stating that there were 39 positives. We didn’t actually get those results until Tuesday morning, and then we started scrambling, trying to find out what was going on there,” he said.
Cogdell Memorial Hospital Lab Director Bill Dickinson said Snyder Oaks requested that the Cogdell lab collect new samples for a retest of the 39 patients who initially tested positive.
“We were able to accommodate them, and do it immediately, that day that they requested,” Dickinson said. “We went out there, collected the specimens, tested them and sent them out to MicroGen Diagnostic Labs in Lubbock, Texas. They tested it, and they resulted it that night. I have great value in this company and I know those tests were reliable tests.”
Dickinson said he reported the results to Hartman, who ordered a third test.
Hicks said reports from around the state began to trickle in indicating other nursing homes around the state were reporting false positive results.
The results of the third test were received in two parts, Thursday evening and Friday morning.
“They’re all negative,” Dickinson said. “We’re real happy to have that outcome.”
“We’re actually going to change the way we’re reporting, and that’s the reason for it,” Health Unit Director Dana Hartman said. “We can put ‘number of tests,’ but even once they go from ‘pending,’ they’re positive, but they can’t go into that positive count, and they’re not going to go into the negative count. So that’s where those numbers get off.”
Dickinson confirmed that the initial scarcity of COVID-19 tests has eased somewhat.
“Right now, our supply is, we have 1,300 nasal-pharyngeal swabs, we have about 1,300 viral transport media,” he said. “We are good. ”
Dickinson said that false negatives are possible, but false positives are more rare.
“We’re talking 68 percent probability of getting positives, so having a false negative, sure, that can be. But we’re doing everything we can, because that’s just the way you collect the sample in general,” he said.