Health department: Sign or forego COVID numbers

Lincoln Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Director Kip Franklin has signed a new data-sharing agreement with the Louisiana Department of Health that should mean he will continue receiving coronavirus lists.

“It’s like they’re holding us over a barrel,” Franklin said Monday.

Late last week the Louisiana Department of Health sent out the agreements that parishes are now required to sign if they want to get names and addresses of people who recently tested positive for COVID-19.

Franklin signed the agreement on Tuesday after talking with area representatives of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

LDH’s requiring the paperwork from parishes is the latest move in a controversy over what the COVID-19 numbers really mean and whether they’re accurate.

LDH’s decision to require data sharing agreements apparently grew out of claims by Red River Parish that the state is inflating the numbers by listing duplicate COVID-19 tests administered to the same patient.

More than once, the Lincoln Parish list has shown the same person with multiple case numbers, Franklin has said. His claims have been echoed by other OEP directors.

But LDH continues to say those directors are wrong.

“This is not a duplication issue,” said Mindy Facine, public information officer with LDH’s Bureau of Media and Communication. “What we have learned is that there is potential confusion about the data parishes are and are not receiving.”

The LDH dashboard’s case count represents individuals with positive results for COVID-19, not numbers of positive test results received, Facine said.

She said LDH scrubs the data to get rid of duplicate entries and other errors, but occasionally some slip by.

“LDH takes great care to correctly assign cases to a home parish to avoid duplication in instances where a person is tested in more than one parish. Despite our best efforts, there may still be a small number of duplicate records in our dataset, and these will be resolved as they are detected, which may lead to changes in case counts,” Facine said.

“The actual number of positive cases is likely higher than what is reported on the LDH dashboard. This may be due to test reporting lags, incomplete testing, and undetected cases among asymptomatic individuals and those who become sick but never get tested.”

When the novel coronavirus pandemic hit Louisiana in March, LDH began issuing the lists of names and addresses so that first responders could make better informed decisions about when to use personal protective equipment that was then in short supply.

“Any other use than for dispatch of first responders is a misuse of this data,” Facine said.

Franklin said that early on, the flow data from LDH went smoothly. But as the number of cases statewide crew, the further behind local data became. The lists were coming from LDH, he said.

At one point, the Louisiana State Police got involved in the transfer of data, evidently because of the security level of their computer system.

Somewhere along the way, OEP directors requested further breakdowns and details of their parishes, still out of concern for safety of first-responders. Ultimately, that meant the data, or some of it, was going through at least two other agencies before it got to local OEP directors.

Apparently, when the state police received the lists from LDH, those lists were merged with the ones from GOHSEP, and that’s where some of the duplications were happening. A state police spokesperson was not available to confirm the process.

LSP is no longer involved. Franklin said he received an email from a Louisiana Sheriff ’s Association official last week saying the data safety had been shifted to that organization for want of better encrypted software to send the data.

That official, Ricky Edwards, was out of his office this week, according to the sheriff ’s association receptionist. The organization’s public information officer had not returned a telephone call as of mid-afternoon Wednesday.

Franklin said initially the COVID-19 lists had been emailed to him in an Excel spreadsheet with password-protected access. But when the sheriff ’s association took over, the data came in zip files. As of Tuesday afternoon, no updated lists had been received.