El Paso’s virus testing milestone in question as count includes re-tests

EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) -- The City of El Paso is now acknowledging some people are getting counted twice in its daily reports that include total number of Covid-19 tests.

The differentiation is important after the city earlier this week announced reaching a milestone of testing 5% of the population two weeks ahead of its goal.

According to city data as of Wednesday, an estimated total of 44,300 tests have been completed. The overwhelming majority of those, about 38,000, have been conducted by private labs.

"Since not all private labs provide their negative results, we cannot validate all duplicates done by private labs," said Assistant El Paso Fire Chief Jorge Rodriguez, who is the city's emergency management coordinator.

County Commissioner David Stout pressed Rodriguez on the numbers during Commissioners Court earlier this week.

"Even if it's a small number it still is misleading," Stout said. "Especially when it comes to our goal -- is to have a certain percentage of the population tested -- if we're having people that are counted twice or more than twice because they've been tested multiple times it skews the number and doesn't give us an accurate count."

Rodriguez said that number is small and said he could provide a differentiation of those numbers.

ABC-7 also requested that differentiation.

"An exact differentiation between total number of tests and total number of people is not available," Rodriguez later said, citing the inability to validate all duplicates done by private labs. "The actual number of tests administered is projected to be higher than the figures reported by the Department of Public Health."

Rodriguez told ABC-7 the figures are reported "conservatively." He said the city can only account for 180 re-tests performed by the health department, the majority of which were return-to-work re-tests of healthcare workers and first-responders.