Kim Reynolds defends Iowa's COVID data credibility, claims transparency after 'glitch' skewed official numbers

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds defended the state's reporting of coronavirus data on Thursday, a day after the Iowa Department of Public Health made substantial changes to those numbers because of a technical problem that had skewed them. 

"The credibility and the accuracy of our data is a top priority," the governor said at a news conference. She described the reporting efforts as "a work in progress over time."

The health department Wednesday changed data reported on its coronavirus website. Department leaders said they were fixing a computer problem that had backdated recent coronavirus test results and made them appear to have happened months ago. The mix-up happened with both positive and negative test results, they said. 

Reynolds said she learned about the problem last week. The state's medical director, Dr. Caitlin Pedati, said she learned of the problem in late July.

Reynolds agreed with health department officials that the issue was related to outdated computer equipment. Throughout state government, "all of our systems are antiquated," she said. She said she would use federal pandemic grants to improve the situation. 

The website's numbers are supposed to help Iowans understand the coronavirus pandemic's effects in their areas. People are using the data to make decisions, including about whether to send children back to in-person classes. 

"We have worked very hard to provide transparency," Reynolds said.

MORE: Reynolds says she'll talk to public health team about the lack of response to reporters' questions

Skeptics have aired concerns about the explanation of the data changes, which came after weeks of questions about numbers being reported on the website. In an interview Wednesday, Pedati said she couldn’t immediately estimate how many test results were affected, "but it’s going to be a lot."

The problem was traced back to the 15-year-old computer system the department uses to track disease data, Pedati said. The mistakes involved Iowans who have been tested multiple times for coronavirus.

Pedati said her agency's staff had been working to fix the problem, and the corrected numbers were loaded onto the department’s coronavirus website Wednesday afternoon.

Pedati said no patient care or contact tracing efforts were affected by the reporting mix-up.

'This has major implications for my trust'

The data backdating errors were brought to public light this week by The Associated Press and the Bleeding Heartland blog. Their stories cited Iowa City nurse practitioner Dana Jones, who noticed inconsistencies in data posted on the state coronavirus website. After Jones inquired about it Aug. 9, an epidemiologist at the state health department emailed her, explaining that a glitch had caused some recent test results to be recorded as happening months earlier.

Jones said Wednesday evening in an interview with the Des Moines Register that she remained skeptical of the department's data, including a remarkably smooth curve purporting to show the overall testing rate increase over recent months without significant spikes and dips.

"I'm so flabbergasted," she said of shifts in data being reported on the website Wednesday. "This has major implications for my trust."

She said the state should remove any patient identification information and then release its full data set for independent analysis. 

Reynolds said she was grateful for the alert that the data appeared faulty.

"I do want to thank Iowans who use the data that we provide, who dig into it and raise questions when they have them," the governor said.

The state’s coronavirus statistics are being closely watched, including by school officials deciding how and when to reopen classes for in-person learning. Reynolds has generally declared that school districts should offer at least 50% in-person classes unless school districts are in counties that have higher than 15% rates of positive results on coronavirus tests and at least 10% of their students absent.

Having recent coronavirus tests backdated to previous months could make a county’s average positivity rate appear artificially low or high, Pedati said. 

She said that with the corrected data, 76 of Iowa’s 99 counties saw declines in their most recent 14-day averages of positive coronavirus tests. Those figures represent the portion of positive coronavirus tests among residents who take the tests.

For example, Humboldt County saw its reported positivity rate plummet from 23.8% before the statistical correction to 8.9% right after, according to the health department's website. By Thursday, that reported rate had dropped to 5.2%. Wright County saw its reported rate drop from 19.1% to 9% on Wednesday, and Clinton County’s dropped from 17% to 13.5%.

Jim Murray, superintendent of the Humboldt Community School District, said Thursday the error hadn't changed the district's plans to return students to classes in person on Aug. 26, simply because the total number of positive cases in the county is so low.

"It has not had any impact on our plans. We were returning in person all along so, we’re on the same plan as we were before," he said in an interview.

On Thursday afternoon, the state coronavirus website showed 97 people in Humboldt County have tested positive for the coronavirus this year, out of 1,689 tests.

Joleen Sernett, director of the Humboldt County public health department, said local health officials have been able to work closely with the school district on plans to return to class. And the department conducts all its own case investigations so officials know exactly how many positive cases they have, she said.

"We know real-time what cases we have, which ones are active, which ones are recovered, any new ones coming in. And so it didn’t concern us," Sernett said of the state's error.

Pedati said Plymouth County saw the biggest increase after the statistical correction, with a reported coronavirus test positivity rate climbing from 14.4% to 16.3% on Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, it was listed at 17.7%, the highest in the state. 

The department’s statistical struggles raised concerns among some outside observers, including University of Iowa biostatistics professor Joseph Cavanaugh.

Cavanaugh said in an interview Wednesday that the backdating discrepancy “seems like a major oversight.”

Cavanaugh, whose University of Iowa team has done coronavirus forecasting work for the Iowa Department of Public Health, said he was surprised such a basic reporting error could be repeated for weeks without being caught and fixed.

“I was rather stunned that this was an ongoing problem,” he said.

Pedati said she understood that the mix-up might make members of the public wonder if her department’s coronavirus reports could be believed. But she said her team is making a good-faith effort to report correct, timely data.

“I can tell you that even before COVID, we knew that we have systems that were not built to handle this kind of volume or be as flexible as we need them to be for something like this,” she said.

Pedati also addressed a statistical issue involving coronavirus test results from “antigen” tests. Those tests provide quicker results than more traditional tests, which must be sent to a lab, but they’re not quite as accurate, she said. Front-line physicians can use them effectively, along with information about symptoms or exposure to the virus, to determine how to care for patients, she said, but they're less useful for epidemiological tracking.

Some local health departments, including Van Buren County's, have been including antigen test results in their reports of positive coronavirus cases. The state health department has not been doing so, but Pedati said it could soon start listing them as “probable” positive cases.

Tony Leys covers health care for the Register. Reach him at tleys@registermedia.com or 515-284-8449. 

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